IN last number we reprinted a paper entitled “The Bearing of Destructive Criticism of the Bible on Missionary Work,” read by the Rev. Dr. Tisdall at a Conference held in London after the annual meeting of the Bible League. The paper was able, sound, and informing in more than ordinary degree, and its general contents appear to us to call for special notice.
It is manifest that the information given by Dr. Tisdall discloses a deplorable state of matters in the Foreign Mission field, such as is fitted to fill with grief every sincere lover of the truth as it is in Jesus. Religious people have been hitherto accustomed to think that the virius of unbelief in the Bible, as the Word of God, was confined to the home country, and that missionaries who went forth at considerable hazard to preach the gospel of salvation to the perishing heathen were men of faith, who believed with their whole heart and soul in the Scriptures as the word of the living God. It is difficult, indeed, for the ordinary Christian mind to understand how men, possessed of standing doubts about the divine inspiration of the Bible, would think of going to distant lands at all to proclaim the gospel it contains, seeing that they must have of necessity, from their own standpoint, only an uncertain gospel to preach. Such there are, however, and no mistake—men who give no real evidence that they have been born again of the incorruptible seed of the Word. The probability is that these men do not really know very well why they desire to go out as missionaries. They profess to be anxious about the souls of the heathen, but all the while they are merely anxious to see something of distant lands, to exercise a certain natural desire to teach others, and to work out, by their self-sacrifice and good deeds, a righteousness, on the ground of which they secretly expect to attain heaven at last. Some such persons may appear very zealous, and yet their zeal has not been kindled at the fire of Christ’s love. The Redeemer Himself, in the days of His flesh, pronounced a woe upon “Scribes, Pharisees, hypocrites,” who were so zealous as to “compass sea and land to make one proselyte.” There is a zeal that is born of the flesh as well as a zeal that is born of the Spirit. This is a distinction that the charitable Christian has painfully to learn at the present day. Lamentable facts compel him to revise his opinion that the missionary is invariably a sound and faithful man, loyal to Christ and His word. He is forced to recognise the solemn truth, that men may do many and apparently great works in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, whom He will refuse to acknowledge at the last day, and to whom He will say, “Depart from me, I know you not, ye workers of iniquity.”
It is certainly not to be overlooked, as matter of encouragement, that there are missions and missionaries here and there throughout the world that are not infected with the Higher Criticism, but it is to be feared that they are in a small minority. After all, the Foreign Mission field is just a reflection of the Churches at home. Here the vast majority of teachers and preachers have come under the influence of this deadly unbelief. The men who are sent out by their authority are trained at home in the same school with themselves, so that they naturally give out (probably in a more veiled form) the dangerous opinions they have received from their theological instructors in the home country. Let us be fully assured that the labours of such missionaries cannot be attended with any saving blessing to the heathen, but will prove harmful in the extreme. What although they give the heathen some instruction from the Bible, if they present the Divine Book as one of only comparative value among many religious books—divorced of its peerless glory, authority, and strength as the infallible word of God! The influence of such teaching is ruinous, leaving the heathen in a more dreadful pit of unbelief than where it found them.
It is further to be noted that those who have adopted the higher critical view of the Bible have departed from other fundamental doctrines of the faith, and cannot preach the true gospel of salvation in its purity and fulness. For one thing, they have departed from the faith concerning the person of the Lord Jesus Christ as God over all-blessed for ever. Does He not set His seal to the Scriptures as the word of God, which cannot be broken in any particular? They refuse to accept His testimony, and thus they dishonour His Godhead. Some of them say that He was limited in His knowledge as man in regard to the Scriptures, but this is to deny His special ability as the Divine Prophet of the Church. It was certainly not given Him by the Father to teach science in the ordinary sense of the word, nor was it given Him to announce the exact day and hour of future events, such as the day of judgment (Mark xiii. 32), but it was most clearly given Him, as the great prophet, to expound the Scriptures. This was an eminent part of His prophetic work, for which he was anointed with the Holy Ghost; and so, to assert for a moment that He was in error about the book of God, is to deny the three Persons in the glorious Godhead at one stroke. Preachers, whether at home or abroad, who hold that the Lord Jesus was in error about the Scriptures, cannot preach the true Christ of God to their fellowmen. Again, we observe that the Higher Criticism undermines the fundamental and saving doctrine of the Atonement. A missionary, who is a higher critic, cannot truly preach “Jesus Christ and him crucified.” We believe that one of the roots of the Higher Criticism is opposition to the principle of satisfaction to divine justice that is involved in the Atonement. The leading exponents of this form of unbelief traduce the sacrifices of the Old Testament Dispensation as relics of paganism, because they proceed on the principle of propitiation by blood. In doing so, they malign the doctrine of the Atonement and evacuate “the cross of Christ” of its true and saving worth. We expect no real converts to Christianity through the preaching of men who know not, in their personal experience, the virtue of the atoning blood of Christ to satisfy divine justice and reconcile sinners to God. Such men have never been quickened in their consciences, or renewed in their hearts, and so are, whatever their profession of interest in the gospel of redeeming love, “enemies of the cross of Christ” and servants of “the god of this world,” with whom there should be no compromise or fellowship. Take away the Bible as the Word of God and the truth concerning the Divinity and Atonement of Christ, and there is no gospel left for people civilised or heathen.
In conclusion, we remark that we have fallen upon evil times when there is such widespread apostacy from “the faith once delivered unto the saints.” Nothing but a day of the power of the Holy Ghost will arrest the tide of infidelity and soul-destroying error that sweeps over the face of Christendom, and will bring missionaries and all other religious teachers, who have gone astray from the truth, back to Christ and His Word.
Music in the Churches.
During the last few weeks a very interesting correspondence has been going on in the columns of the Scotsman on the above subject. Strong complaints are made in many letters as to the great loss sustained in Scottish Church worship by the supplanting of the Psalms by hymns. These complaints come from men who cannot be charged with “Celtic gloom” or an undue regard to the older forms of praise in Scotland. It is evident that the innovators are beginning to reap the harvest, and the harvest, according to many letter writers, is silent congregations and heartless singing. What with organs and the use of tunes by choirs with which the people are unfamiliar, this part of the service has well nigh lost interest for them.