The Puritan Hope

Iain Murray

Matthew Henry’s Chapel at Chester. The doctrines once preached in these old buildings are destined to be heard again across the world: ‘Jesus Christ the same yesterday , and today, and for ever’

‘By a generation such as ours, all talk of the triumph of Christianity is heard with impatient incredulity. This is especially the case in Western Europe and the British Isles, for here the full weight of the tragedies of our day has been felt. In the Americas traces of pre-1914 optimism linger. In some respects, in its attitudes and conditions, the New World is now the Old World and the Old World of Europe has become the New World, a feared foretaste of what is to come universally.’

WE have in these pages sketched in broad outline what may be called the Puritan attitude toward history; in doing so we have noted how their perspective developed from faith in the promises of Scripture respecting Christ’s kingdom and how it was part of a theology which proclaimed the controlling plan of God behind all events. It was no accident that hope gained this ascendency when Pauline and Calvinistic orthodoxy possessed the thinking of the Church. John Barlow was a spokesman of characteristic Puritan thought when he told his people at Plymouth:
‘Whom he chooseth, shall be created, called, justified, sanctified, glorified; because his purpose cannot be altered, his promise revoked. Let Manasseh repair the high places, rear altars for Baal; the Prodigal run from his Father, drink and swill, consume his portion; Saul make havoc of the saints, put them in prison, do many things against Jesus of Nazareth: yet shall they come to themselves, mourn for their sins, and be saved. For they are elected, beloved of him who is the same for ever. Were it not thus, what hope could the faithful have to see Babel ruinated, the Roman whore burned, the Jew called, the Devil’s kingdom destroyed and Christ’s perfected ?“ 1
For the Puritans there was immense optimism in such doctrine. It was the same optimism which appeared in the prayers of Christian people in the age of decline between the Puritans and the eighteenth-century revival, which came to renewed
[223]

public expression in that great awakening and led on, as though irresistible, to the world-wide missionary enterprise of English-speaking Protestantism.
While we have sought to comment upon these themes we have had little opportunity to trace the resulting influence of this outlook upon the general thinking of those nations where the hope held sway, though this was of momentous historical significance. There was a connection between this belief and the sense of purpose and destiny established in the common consciousness of Britain and America,2 which sense of purpose, in turn, instilled a discipline and vigour in national life such as was never witnessed in civilizations where philosophies of fate or chance have prevailed. This consciousness found eloquent expression, for example, in Lord Macaulay’s History of England, the first two volumes of which were published in 1848. Macaulay was linked by family background to the Church of Scotland and to Wilberforce’s ‘Clapham Sect’. His ‘great work’, writes Winston Churchill, ‘provided the historical background for the sense of progress which was now inspiring Victorian Britain. Macaulay set out to show that the story of England since the Whig Revolution of 1688 was one of perpetual and limitless advance. In his opening chapter he wrote:
“The history of our own country in the last hundred and sixty years is eminently the history of physical, moral and intellectual improvement.” This was a heartening note, much appreciated by contemporary readers. Optimism reigned throughout the land. . .
From the standpoint of Scripture, Macaulay’s thought was certainly mixed, yet it is plain that his was a view of history strongly affected by the perspective which came from the seventeenth century. Nor was Macaulay the last great historian to hold that view. In the darkest days of 1940, Churchill, whose outlook had been early influenced by Macaulay, saw history as directed by the hand of God and believed that the world would not go under. Perhaps the saddest feature of Churchill’s closing years, after the Second World War, was that his hold upon this truth seemed to become increasingly tenu [224]

ous. The appearances of the post-war world — the ‘Iron Curtain’, the hydrogen bomb, the four hundred million shut within China — all seemed to make the old belief in providence impossible. ‘I am bewildered by the world,’ Churchill said in 1953, ‘the confusion is terrible’,4 and two years later as his great Parliamentary career came to its end, he spoke with pathos of his fears for those who should live in the future ‘if God wearied of mankind’.
‘What ought we to do if God wearied of mankind? That,’ comments Lord Moran, ‘was the question that tormented him as he came towards the end of his journey.’5
Though this is comparatively recent history, the wider effects of the ‘great decay in belief’ which Churchill observed,6 and the truth of his words, ‘It is bad for a nation when it is without faith’,7 have been widely evidenced. The loss of national purpose, the loss of will to advance, the indiscipline and futility of permissiveness, all these are the symptoms of an age in which the dominating mood is one of cynicism and pessimism. To the modern mind, history is not under any control.
* * *

If the rise of a sense of destiny in Protestant Britain and America stemmed in the first place from Christian thought, it is equally true to say that the collapse of that outlook must be associated with the failure of the Church to maintain the truths committed to her. Today the Church no longer appears before men as world transforming power; gone are the anticipations of non-Christians in India that the whole system of pagan thought is soon to collapse about them; gone, too, at home, is that sacrificial enthusiasm for the conversion of the world which was once so common among Christians.
The run-down of missionary endeavour is one of the clearest pointers to this change. When all has been said on such things as the end of the ‘pax Britannica’ — which facilitated missions as the ‘pax Romana’ had done in the first century — and the rise of strong nationalism in Africa and Asia, the fact remains that the Church herself has largely lost confidence in her

[225]

as the growth of a healthier outlook. Disbelief in ‘Calvinism’, however, was soon followed by the rise of unbelief in the inerrancy of Scripture, and then the gospel itself — the incarnation of the Son of God to bear vicariously in his death the wrath sin deserves — was made a subject for legitimate doubt within the Church. Intellect replaced faith and ‘scholarship’ gave her support to the spreading delusion. Thus Dr. John Duncan, speaking on the Christian future of the Jews in the Free Church General Assembly in 1867, warned his hearers:
‘Do not ‘both indications of Scripture and the signs of the times lead us to think that a new epoch is approaching, when a great Gentile apostasy shall be accompanied or followed by the recall of Israel to Jehovah their God, and David their king? Wondrous, without doubt, will be the results of that event.... Dark days, I fear, are to intervene.’9 It may be considered remarkable that this erosion of faith should have gained ground rapidly in the very Church which had so singularly served the world with the pure gospel of Christ, yet so it was with the Free Church of Scotland. When that Church realigned herself with the United Presbyterian Church in 1900 to become the United Free Church, only twenty-seven ministers remained in the continuing Free Church which, like a relic from’ antiquity, stood fully pledged to the Westminster Confession of Faith. This phenomenon, however, was not new. The eminent DanishHalle Mission had been a powerful influence abroad until the last quarter of the eighteenth century when ‘rationalism at home dug up its roots’.’0
Alexander Duff had warned his fellow-countrymen of the danger: ‘Let not the day dawn upon old Scotland that shall see the school separated from the Bible and from Christianity’ he had said in 1854.” And in 1866 he spoke of the new Chair of Missions at New College as the answer of the Free Church to modern error — ‘We believe in the Bible — the whole Bible, as Divine; we believe in its plenary inspiration as an absolute revelation from God; and we are determined to establish this Professorship for the express purpose of rearing up young men, who at home and abroad shall authoritatively proclaim these
[227]

great and vital truths, in the face of all the heresy-mongers on earth.”2 But Duff’s expectation was not realized and within twenty years some professors in the Free Church were encouraging rationalism without any effective discipline being exerted against them. The Rev. M. Macaskill of Dingwall, in the early 1890’s, charged Henry Drummond, Professor of Natural Science at the Free Church College, Glasgow, with upholding teaching which is ‘throughout, the purest naturalism
— of the earth, earthy, and hence Christ-dishonouring and soul-destroying’. The Christ Drummond wrote about, said Macaskill, ‘is not the Christ of God, but a social, semi-political Christ, wholly the creation of the writer’s own imagination’.’3
These opinions, as Macaskill well saw, would revolutionize the whole concept of foreign missions. According to the new view, Christ had not come as the only way for sinners to approach God. ‘Religion was in the world before Christ came, and it lives today in a million souls who have never heard His name’. So Drummond believed and the current of opinion was increasingly upon his side.
When the World Missionary Conference met at Edinburgh in 1910 the influence of theological liberalism was clear enough. Eight commissions prepared the way for the Conference, the chairman of one of them being Charles Gore, at that time Bishop of Birmingham, of whom W. H. T. Gairdner in his commemorative volume Edinburgh 1910 tells us that he was ‘a Platonist to the core in intellectual attitude a man whose enthusiasm for religious education at home, and abroad also, was simply the Christianisation of his Platonism’.’4 The chairman of another commission was Professor D. S. Cairns, and Gairdner speaks of the report which Cairns laid before the Conference on ‘The Missionary Message in Relation to the Non-Christian Religions as ‘one of the most remarkable, perhaps the most remarkable, of a great series’. It certainly struck notes unknown to the former leaders of British missionary endeavour:
‘While of course theories as to the origin and significance of the non-Christian religions still vary, there is a general consensus that representing as they do many attempted solutions
[228]

of life’s problems, they must be approached with very real sympathy and respect.... More than that, the conviction has grown that their “confused cloud-world” will be found to be “shot through and through with broken lights of a hidden sun”. And, these things being true, another conviction has dawned: Christianity, the religion of the Light of the World, can ignore no lights however “broken” — it must take them all into account, absorb them all into its central glow. Nay, since the Church of Christ itself is partially involved in mists of unbelief, failing aspiration, imperfect realisation, this quest of hers among the non-Christian religions, this discovering of their “broken lights” may be to her the discovery of facets of her own truth. . . . Christ’s church may recover all the light that is in Christ.”5
That such words could be supposed to give new inspiration to missionary endeavour was indeed proof that a new outlook upon the world was being formed; no longer the stress upon repentance and conversion, no longer the assurance that historic Christianity has the only true claim to become the universal religion, instead, a growing belief that if there is to be one world religion it must be in some measure syncretistic in form, Christian perhaps in name and ‘spirit’, but with little of its doctrine. Herein lay the tragedy of the Church’s .approach to the world in the twentieth century. Hesitant now to proclaim authoritative truth, she solaced herself in the face of men’s unwillingness to receive Christianity with the idea that the old ‘dogmatic’ approach to evangelizing the earth was no longer legitimate. The run-down of missionary endeavour thus proceeded apace without any profound humiliation and self-examination on the part of the Protestant Churches. Disbelief in Scripture lay hidden beneath professed charity and tolerance.
The most notable attempt to unmask that unbelief occurred in the testimony of J. Gresham Machen in America in the 1930’s, by which time the initiative in foreign missions had passed from Britain to the United States. But there, also, as a result of spiritual decline and the financial burdens of the
[229]

great depression, retrenchment on the mission field was the order of the day. In 1932 there appeared a volume compiled by a distinguished committee from many denominations and chaired by a Harvard professor, entitled Re- Thinking Missions:
a Layman’s Inquiry After One Hundred rears. This was an apologia for the new approach to missions, asserting that ‘the relation between religions must take increasingly hereafter the form of a common search for truth’. Liberal missionaries applauded it. Pearl Buck foresaw ‘possibly the greatest missionary impetus that we have known for centuries’16 though what missionary work was to consist in now that Christianity and other religions must co-exist in concord was far from clear.
On the other hand, Machen’s reply to the book included these charges: ‘It deprecates the distinction between Christians and non-Christians; it belittles the Bible and inveighs against Christian doctrine; it dismisses the doctrine of eternal punishment as a doctrine antiquated even in Christendom; it presents Jesus as a great religious Teacher and Example, as Christianity’s “highest expression of religious life”, but certainly not as very God od very God…..
When a true spiritual history of the twentieth century is written, Machen’s stand against Re- Thinking Missions, and the controversy in which it involved him with the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions, will be seen as one of the last attempts to stop historic missionary agencies falling under the control of unbelief. The fact that he was not able to do so and that he was even suspended by the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., in 1935, two years before his death, shows how strongly the tide was running.
We have considered the above comments necessary by way of an explanation as to how the vision which inspired the leaders of the modern missionary era, beginning in the 1790’s, came to be abandoned. It was not that the outlook of Carey, Duff and Livingstone was maintained and found wanting; nor that in discipling the nations in faithfulness to Scripture the Churches found their resources unequal to the task, nor that populations increased too fast to allow the Church to (230)

maintain her progress in non-Christian lands. The truth is that faith in Christ had waned and without Him the advance of Christianity was found — as had often been found before —impossible with man. ‘Without me ye can do nothing.’ As. Spurgeon said in a sermon preached on July 6, 1890, ‘Our want of faith has done more mischief to us than all the devils in hell, and all the heretics on earth. Some cry out against the Pope, and others - against agnostics: but it is our own unbelief which is our worst enemy.,
This is not to overlook the burden of missionary endeavour that has been carried on by inter-denominational evangelical missionary societies in the twentieth century, without whom the earth would have been dark indeed and whose spirit of sacrifice and urgency has borne excellent fruit. The chief source of weakness in these societies has generally been their unfamiliarity with those reservoirs of spiritual strength which had meant so much to the pioneers of an earlier age. The lessons of church history, particularly of the revivals of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, were not studied; the;; creeds of the Calvinistic churches were viewed as inimical to” the missionary spirit and the idea that the gospel was intended to have dominion in the world before Christ’s Return was treated as a tenet of liberalism. Nineteenth-century pre-millennialism, which from Brethren influence tended to despise all church history as mere human traditions, prevailed generally in the evangelical societies and the spreading unbelief in the historic denominations seemed conclusive confirmation of the conviction that the final apostasy before the Advent had commenced. Pessimism over the future of the Church’s work in the world was now accepted as orthodoxy.
* * *

If hope is to be regained today, upon what grounds can itbe built? It will hardly do to say that we must simply ‘hope’ for a revival. Until the last century, revivals occurred with a regularity which made some speak as though their recurring cycle was axiomatic but more than a hundred years have passed
[231]

endeavour proceeded everywhere with vigour, the inspiration came in the first place from the believing apprehension of biblical truths. As Donald MacLean says of those who initiated the commencement of missions from Scotland, they ‘grasped the fact that Paul’s declarations of profound mysteries in his Epistle to the Romans were not the cold intellectual conclusions of an exclusive dbgmatist, but flames from the soul of a Christian missionary consumed with zeal for the salvation of men.”8
This needs particular emphasis in connection with missionary endeavour, for the modern tendency has been to suppose that missionaries need little theological preparation and that the latter might even militate against a zeal for souls. This was not Carey’s attitude, nor Bogue’s at Gosport. For them sound divinity was fundamental. We likewise find Thomas Scott, to whom was committed the care of prospective missionaries for the Church Missionary Society, regretting in a letter to a friend that, ‘The missionaries as they have hitherto come to me, have been pious men, but superficial theologians’.19 In the same vein Alexander Duff deplored the comparatively small instruction often given to missionaries and the allowance of a difference standard in them from that of home ministers:
‘If any difference at all were to be tolerated, I have no hesitation in saying that it ought to be in favour of the enhanced standard of attainment indispensable for the foreign missionary
— and especially for the missionary to India or China, or the dominions of the False Prophet.’20
Hope, then, respecting the future of the world must not be an expectation that God will work regardless of the failure of his Church, but rather that God will recall the Church and especially her ministry to that standard of full commitment to the gospel of Christ which Scripture commands. Such commitment was the characteristic of the most widely used preachers in the era we have considered. David Bogue believed he was drawing the right lesson when he declared that it will be this same pattern of preaching which, renewed on a wider scale, will bring to pass the world-wide kingdom of Christ:
[233]

‘One means, and indeed the greatest and most effectual for introducing the glory of the latter days, is the preaching of the:gospel. This is the method which the Saviour of sinners appointed for the propagation of his religion: “Go ye”, says he to his apostles, Mark 16.15, “into all the world and preach] the gospel to every creature.” And why was this method appointed, but because it appeared the fittest and the best? and this appointment by so high authority, guided in all its acts by infinite wisdom, gives it an unquestionable superiority to every other. Were we unable to perceive any reason for this preference, that ought not to create a shadow of doubt in our mind: God has said it; and this surely is sufficient to make use receive it as an absolute truth. . . . For general utility and extensive efficacy, what other method can be compared to this? The history of the Christian Church, for nearly eighteen hundred years, can be adduced to display in the most luminous manner, from page to page, its superiority to every other. Let it also be remembered, that whenever the sacred Scripture speaks of the conversion of the world to Christ, and specifies the means by which it is to be accomplished — that means is always the preaching of the gospel. . . .
‘To communicate to the preaching of the gospel all the light and power necessary for the accomplishment of this amazing work, God will raise up in great abundance eminent ministers,’ full of truth, piety and zeal. What can be done by an individual of this class, in promoting the interests of Christ’s kingdom,:may be seen in the exertions of Knox in Scotland, and Whitefield in England. A hundred such men — if not restrained ~ by the ten horns which gave their power to the beast — would change the face of the Christian Church. In order to introduce the Millennium, many thousands of ministers like them will God raise up, and send forth into the harvest, and he will crown their labours with extraordinary success. From a multitude of such labourers in every country, what may not be expected!’21
In these words, and many more that could be quoted, Bogue was reiterating the Puritan beliegfand the conviction so
[234]

gospel to vast numbers in revival periods, then, at the least, there is cause to consider the words which Charles Hodge, one of the last great expounders of the Puritan hope, wrote in trembling characters a little while before he died: ‘I am fully persuaded that the vast majority of the human race will share in the beatitudes and glories of our Lord’s redemption.’22 Whether that be so or not, certain it is that all the conversions which take place in the vast world populations of the future will be through the divine power of Christ. ‘When the Lord shall build up Zion, he shall appear in his glory’ (Psa. 102.16). And when, with the plenitude of his Spirit, ‘the Deliverer shall come out of Zion and shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob’ (Rom. 11.26), we are told the extent of that amazing work, ‘All Israel shall be saved’. As we ponder such texts, as Carey did the great promises of Isaiah in the momentous year 1792, who can deny that we may have limited sinfully in our thoughts the scope of the victory which Calvary has obtained? While the word ‘all’ in Scripture in most instances does not mean ‘everyone, without exception’, it does often point to an immense number. The children of Christ are to be ‘like the sand of the sea-shore’ and ‘like the stars of heaven for multitude.’ The sufferings of the cross and Christ’s present power guarantee that these millions will all be gathered: ‘And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me’
(John 12.32).

The glory of Christ has indeed been declared in the earth in past ages. In the apostolic age, ‘His lightnings enlightened the world: the earth saw, and trembled.’ Psa. 97.4 The Reformers and Puritans beheld him as the conquering King and it made them strong. The eighteenth-century Church knew his tower and longed with Charles Wesley that

the world might taste and see The riches of His grace.
The same was true in revivals of the last century. ‘It were worth living ten thousand ages in obscurity and reproach,’ declared one minister in Ulster, ‘to be permitted to creep forth
[236]

at the expiration of that time and engage in the glorious work of the last six months of 1859.’23 But this world, according to the word of prophecy, has not seen the last such wonders of salvation; there are reserved for the future such evidences of ‘ the efficacy of the blood of Christ that the Apostle, as he anticipated them and contemplated the grandeur of the whole plan of God, exclaimed, ‘0 the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God!’ There is no hope for the world apart from revivals, but it is not in revivals that the faith of the Church is to be rooted. Christ himself is the object of faith. The same faith which looks for his final appearing must also trust in his promised presence as the nations are evangelized. The Church, being united to him in whom the Spirit dwells without measure, will be built; she can no more be deprived of the Spirit’s aid than can the finished work of Christ — upon which the mission of the Spirit proceeds — be undone. When, therefore, the people of God find themselves with little evidence of spiritual prosperity, they are not to conclude that henceforth the Church can only be a dwindling minority in a pagan world, nor are they to suppose that they may suspend working until there be some new outpouring of the Spirit: rather their present duty is to exercise a fuller confidence in the word and person of the Son of God. In so doing they will not find the Spirit who glorifies Christ to be absent. ‘Christians’, says Luther, ‘must have the vision which enables them to disregard the terrible spectacle and outward appearance, the devil and the guns of the whole world, and to see Him who sits on high and says: “I am the One who spoke to you.” ‘24
When Christ is thus the object of faith, then will his promise always be fulfilled, ‘Nothing shall be impossible unto you’
(Matt. 17.20).

We close with the words of C. H. Spurgeon:
‘The fulness of Jesus is not changed, then why are our works so feebly done? Pentecost, is that to be a tradition? The reforming days, are these to be memories only? I see no reason why we should not have a greater Pentecost than Peter saw, and a Reformation deeper in its foundations, and truer in its
[237]