FROM The English Churchman.
THE Bombay Guardian of 13th August contained an article upon the recent Edinburgh Conference. . . . The writer is “A Delegate,” and to the article is prefixed the text 2 Cor. x. 4: “For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strongholds.” The article reads:—
“While we can thank God most heartily for all that was of His Spirit and according to His Word at this great Conference, and for the words of truth and faith that fell from the lips of many speakers, and for the devoted lives and incessant labours that are behind these, yet we cannot but recall that the World Missionary Conference began with the rigid exclusion of Missions to Roman Catholic countries, including even such a Continent of gross superstition and idolatry as South America, this compact or understanding being faithfully observed by the eight Commissions into whose reports no reference to Missions to Roman Catholics has been permitted to enter. A significant colouring was given to this attitude when Anglican bishops and others in sympathy with the Roman Catholics were allowed to break through this reticence without apology during the course of the Debates in Conference, and it has culminated, alas, in the suggested recognition of the Roman Catholic Church as an ally in the great missionary enterprise directed towards the 1,000 millions of non-Christian races of the world, and in the proposal that no
future Missionary Conference can pretend to be Ecumenical that does not include the Propaganda of the Vatican. It was stated by the Bishop of Southwark that the Church of Rome had a greater past as a missionary Church and had to-day more missionaries in the foreign field than all the Protestant Churches combined, and that the eminent saints of the Church of Christ had been in the Roman community, and he could understand and appreciate the position of any Christian in regard to the Pope enthroned at Rome, that it gave someone to look up to and from whom order and authority proceeded, but that in respect to that kind of evangelicalism represented in its extreme form by the Plymouth Brethren, it was something to look down upon as having no directive force or ability to rule, and that the position of the Anglican Church was that of a via media to keep open the door of approach and reconciliation between Rome and Protestantism. He was supported in these views by the Bishop of Birmingham, Bishop Brent of the Philippines, Bishop Montgomery of the S.P.G., and others who endeavoured to show that Rome was an integral part of the Christian Missionary forces in the world, and that every possible effort should be made to secure that in any really Ecumenical Missionary Conference she was represented, if not by Delegates because of her own aloofness as a result of persistent slander and misrepresentation, then at least by honorary associates expressive of her responsiveness. It was said also by a Bishop that not only was Undenominationalism dead but that this Conference showed it was buried and gone for ever. He very clearly was not aware in how many hearts, thank God, there is still an echo to Whitfield’s prayer.
‘Let sects and names and parties fall,
And Christ alone be Lord of all.’
It was, moreover, advocated by speakers in sympathy with Rome that Union should commence, if it had not already begun, in the nascent Churches of the East; that converts won by Protestant Missions in China and India and Africa should seek, under the guidance of their missionaries, to found a native Church that would be wide enough to include the converts of the Roman Catholic Church, so that there should be one National Church of Christ in China and one in India and one in Africa. But other voices were heard, both in the Conference Hall and outside it, albeit they were not called upon to speak from the platform, saying that while they were ready to recognize that there have been and doubtless are still in the Roman Catholic Church many individuals who have found eternal life by entrusting their souls to Christ for salvation, yet she could not be regarded as a missionary agency to win a lost and ruined world for Christ, but, on the contrary, she was herself sunk in darkness and superstition and in sore need of all the loving self-sacrificing missionary help that can be extended to her. If they followed the counsels of these speakers and recalled some of the saints of the Roman Catholic Church, it would be by
remembering her whom Louis Quatorze, impelled by Roman Catholic prelates, cast into the dungeons of la Bastille, where she (Madame Guyon) wrote the hymn,
‘A little bird am I,
Shut from the fields of air,
Yet in my cage I sit and sing
To Him Who placed me there,’
and those who fill the canvas of the historical painting of the massacre of St. Bartholomew, who may claim to share with the Piedmontese Milton’s sublime sonnet,
‘Avenge, O Lord, Thy slaughtered saints, whose bones
Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold;
E’en them who kept Thy truth so pure of old.’
Nor is it in vain that the blood of the Covenants has stained the soil of Scotland. God does not repent of His mighty works. To some there seemed a mute warning in the uplifted arm of the colossal statue of John Knox which stands at the entrance to the Assembly Hall of the United Free Church of Scotland, in which had grown in barely ten days an atmosphere that he could not have breathed. To them there seemed a strange import in the moments of darkness that fell upon the hall while the Bishop of Southwark and Bishop Brent of the Philippines were urging union with Rome, and in the loud crash of thunder in the heavens, while the electric lights were turned on to supply the light that suddenly failed at noon on a midsummer day, that excepting for this one half-hour gave light to read by till 10 o’clock at night. A great and solemn responsibility rests upon those who propose supporting ‘the Continuation Committee’ that has been called into existence in such an atmosphere, and that by the presence of the Right Rev. the Bishop of Southwark and Mr. Silas M’Bea and others on its Board of Management, is not likely to disassociate itself from the pursuance of a policy of sympathetic approach to Rome during the ten years that must elapse before the assembling of the next World Missionary Conference. There has been too much engineering of this Conference, so that a large number of Delegates, who repudiate and reject the proposal to hold out hands to seek the co-operation of the Roman Catholic Church in preaching the Gospel to all the world, have not only been outnumbered, but also made to appear as contributing to a universal unanimity on the part of this vast assembly of missionary Delegates.
The word ‘Unity’ was used countless times by speakers in the Assembly Hall: it was a sort of keyword, but only in their own special sense. In the New Testament, however, it occurs but twice: both passages are in the fourth chapter of Ephesians. It may be said at once that there was not throughout this Conference any discussion of the unity of the Fourth of Ephesians. Had this been raised, the Conference would have fallen to pieces. It was held together by a common consent, and under what is now realised to have been a mistaken estimate of the value of co-operation at all costs when in the presence of Heathendom.
The Continuation Committee will seek to impose an official unification upon the Missionary Boards that will, after years of effort, lead them into a gigantic Federation; and ‘the irreducible minimum’ of fixed beliefs that will survive that fining pot will be indeed small. Officialism will take the place of spiritual methods, and an outward federated unification will obscure the absence of true inward unity that is brought about by the Holy Spirit. Necessarily, in such a pursuit, prominence must be given to the points on which it is expected the various Missionary Societies will agree. Common ground for agreement will perhaps be found in certain doctrines widely accepted in the present day, such as the universal Fatherhood of God, and that Christendom is identical with the Church of Christ, and should be purified and extended over the nations still outside it; while matters of faith and practice in which it is impossible to reach agreement could be relegated to an Appendix, that may be eventually dropped out and a broad basis be laid for the initiation of union through the various Missionary Societies. There is little doubt as to what will go into the Appendix. One speaker appointed to open with prayer thanked God on behalf of the Conference that in like manner as He had given Prophets to Israel of old to be their instructors until the coming of Jesus Christ, so also He had given Leaders of Light to other nations throughout the world, such as Confucius and Buddha, and that those who accepted their teaching would find, when they came under the influence of Christianity, in it the fulfilment of what their religious teachers had taught them. Another speaker, in a masterly address to the Conference, attributed the descriptions and terrors of Hell, and belief in Satan and evil spirits, that were once so prominent a characteristic of the Christian religion, but had now happily almost disappeared, to the same materialistic source that is found in the earliest times in the Animistic cults, as attested by efforts to appease and make friendly an angry God. Another speaker delivered a most eloquent address before the Conference, vehemently affirming our Lord to be the man Jesus, but never once calling Him the Son of God; it was a magnificent exposition of the best type of Christian Unitarianism inside the Church.
Some earnest and devoted servants of God purposely abstained themselves from the hall, aware that particular speakers were reputed to hold such views as were, in their opinion, subversive of the very foundations of the Christian Faith, but there were many ignorant of all this, who had relied on the management to exclude such views, and who afterwards regretted having been led to give by their presence an apparent support to what they entirely disagreed with. It is surely time that those who feel increasingly the tremendous responsibility of identifying themselves with such things, should speak plainly and should consider well before giving their support to the ‘Continuation Committee’ that has been called into existence in order to perpetuate and carry farther such a scheme of world-wide missionary union.”