USA > Massachusetts > Essex County > Andover > History of Andover theological seminary, 1933 > Part 11
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The missions were limited in resources and crippled in personnel, for the climate took fearful toll of missionary lives, and the attitude of the Government was reluctant if not un- friendly. More missionaries died than there were natives baptized. But nothing daunted the students who met under the auspices of the Society of Inquiry on Andover Hill. Graves represented the class of 1815 on his departure for Bombay, where he worked for twenty-six years. Nichols of the next class also went to Bombay, but he lived only six years. With all the odds against them the youthful missionaries kept at work. The care of boarding schools, the preaching and touring, the patient study of language, the time-consuming conversations with individuals whom they were trying to reach, filled their days. The need of trained natives as teachers warranted the establishment of a theological seminary in Ceylon, of which Daniel Poor was in charge for twelve years, an Andover man transplanted to the tropics of the Indian
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Ocean. To provide suitable wives for the native men a semi- nary for girls was started also. Revivals cheered the hearts of the workers ; defections from the ranks of the native Chris- tians discouraged them, but there were a few who proved capable and true. The workers at Bombay explored the in- terior and selected Ahmednagar one hundred and fifty miles away as a center there. Persecution added to the troubles of the missionary, but perseverance always won in time, if the missionary did not die first. It was pioneering with all the perils and discouragements that check and seem to baffle, but with the missionary urge in their hearts the Americans could not stop.
A third mission of Andover men was to the Sandwich Is- lands. Obookiah had been at Andover intermittently, and when he died before he was ready to carry the gospel back to his own Hawaiian people, it seemed that men from the Hill must take his place. Asa Thurston, a graduate of Yale and of the class of 1819 at Andover, and his classmate, Hiram Bingham from Middlebury, agreed to go together. Ordained in Connecticut, and in Park Street Church in Boston organized into a church with others who were going with them, they sailed in the fall of 1819 on a five months' voyage to the heart of the Pacific. Bingham labored twenty-five years at Hono- lulu before he returned to America. Thurston, blessed with a strong physique, was able to remain forty-eight years in the islands without visiting America. Doubtfully received at first, though idolatry had been abolished, the missionaries soon made themselves welcome. Bingham's good nature and firmness won over Hawaiian royalty, and he became the friend and ad- visor of the sovereign. The natives loved him. Like Thurs- ton he preached and translated the Bible into the language of the people as soon as he gained command of their tongue. He itinerated ; he superintended native schools; he interpreted English for kings and chiefs, remaining until pioneer methods were no longer possible. Then back in America he carried on missionary propaganda, publishing a history of the mission as well as preaching and lecturing, until he passed on at the age of eighty. William Richards was a third Andover alum-
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nus, going to Hawaii in 1822. He, too, was a teacher and an advisor of the chiefs, especially with the new constitution, which included a bill of rights based on the Bible. Richards was more than a missionary. For three years he was ambas- sador of the islands to Great Britain. He was minister of instruction, counsellor and chaplain to the king. He lectured on political science, and in his mission at Lahaina he was a father to the natives. John S. Emerson followed in the foot- steps of the pioneers, centering his work at Waialua, toiling faithfully for thirty-five years.
The American Board depended on Andover graduates to man its fourth mission, that to the Near East. For years it had been a fond hope that Palestine might be won for Chris- tianity. In the same year that Thurston and Bingham turned their faces westward, Pliny Fisk and Levi Parsons, who had graduated recently from the Seminary, set sail for the Holy Land. That country was part of a vast Turkish empire where the Koran determined the norm of religion. But there were Jews in Palestine who had not forgotten the God of their fathers, and the youthful optimists from America hoped to persuade them of the worth of Christianity. They did not go at once to Jerusalem. From Smyrna as a base they toured Asia Minor, and after a year Parsons attempted to settle in Jerusalem, but political agitation delayed him, and the next year he was dead. His place was taken promptly by Jonas King, of the class of 1819 at Andover, who surrendered the prospect of an Andover professorship to fill temporarily the gap in the Near East. From Malta King and Fisk toured Egypt on the way to Palestine, studying languages mean- while; explored Palestine and Syria to acquaint themselves with the land and the people ; but before the work could be established King's time was up, and Fisk followed Parsons to a better country.
Before Fisk died Goodell and Bird had said goodbye to the brick halls of the Seminary, and on their arrival in the eastern Mediterranean had settled at Beirut for a Syrian mis- sion. Because of its location Beirut proved the best missionary center for that region, and preparations were made for a varied
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ministry in many tongues. Arabic and Syriac, Turkish and Armenian, Italian and English, were in use, and Bible trans- lations were needed. The usual methods of publication and education were employed. Within five years six hundred pupils were in attendance. Persecution visited them, but con- verts came, and a church was established in Beirut ; yet in- creasing peril drove the missionaries to Malta for a time.
Twenty alumni of Andover Seminary had thus ventured in ten years' time to carry the seed of the Christian faith and sow it in pagan lands. They found a stony soil and inhospit- able people. Alike in India and Syria they met persecution and fell on death. Followers of the Apostle to the Gentiles whom they studied in Bartlet Chapel, disciples of the Master who had the courage to die on a cross, they did not flinch at hardship or even death. In the roll of honor of Andover men their names are gold. They fell at the listening post, but the summons of heathendom found its silent way behind the lines at home, and when training time was over reinforcements followed the pioneers.
The story of the missionary fortunes of Andover men is too long to follow in detail. It is a moving picture, bringing into view one country after another, introducing the observer to one and another of those who gave their strength to build the structure of the missionary enterprise. The panorama still moves on, and the Society of Inquiry still ponders upon the need and the message.
The missionary impulse, which had sent so many pioneers to distant lands, was propagating faith in the enterprise in America itself. It was the little group of devoted students who kept it alive at Andover. It was Mills among the Con- gregationalists and Rice among the Baptists, whose broad vision embraced home as well as foreign missions. Mills realized his own limitations as a toiler on the mission field, but he knew he could promote the cause at home. Touring the American Southwest, he explored the country as a possible mission field, and made himself useful organizing Bible soci- eties and distributing the Scripture. While residing for a time among Presbyterians in the Middle States, he promoted mis-
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sionary and Bible societies there. He took so great an interest in the negro that he crossed the Atlantic to explore West Africa for the African Colonization Society, and there his vigor burned itself out and he died at sea. Rice visited Bap- tist churches through the Eastern States, stimulated the raising of money and men, and broadened the scope of the Baptist missionary organization to include home missions and Chris- tian education.
The spirit that wooed Samuel J. Mills did not cease to echo through Andover halls. At the fortieth Commencement of the Seminary, after addresses from twenty-eight graduates, they sang these words as a parting hymn :
" I cannot rest ; there comes a sweet and secret whisper to my spirit Like a dream of night,
That tells me I am on enchanted ground.
The voice of my departed Lord, Go, teach all nations, Comes on the night air And awakes my ear.
Why live I here? The vows of God are on me,
And I may not stop to play with shadows or pluck earthly flowers
Till I my weary pilgrimage have done.
And I will go !
I may no longer doubt to give up friends and idle hopes,
And every tie that binds my heart to worldly joys.
Henceforth then it matters not if storm or sunshine be my earthly lot ;
Bitter or sweet my cup,-
I only pray God make me holy and my spirit nerve for the stern hour of strife.
And if one for whom Satan hath struggled as he hath for me Shall ever reach that blessed shore;
O how this heart will flame with gratitude and love !
Through ages of eternal years, I'll ne'er regret That toil and suffering Once were mine below."
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A new era opened for missions in India when the renewed charter of the East India Company gave them legal standing. Reinforcements in Ceylon made it possible for Spaulding and Poor to enter the city of Madura on the mainland, where they might work in the home country of the Tamils. The city was the center of a broad agricultural area. Definite progress was made. Nearly two thousand pupils were gathered into schools, new stations were opened, and the good will of government and people was won through the wisdom and moderation of the men of Andover who founded the mission. Miron Wins- low, a classmate of Spaulding in the Seminary, was sent out to Ceylon after his graduation, and in 1836 was transferred to Madras. That city became the center of a publishing enter- prise in which other denominations cooperated. Winslow mastered the language and then gave much of his time to a revision of the Tamil Bible. When time permitted he toured through the interior, sometimes ranging far. Such journeys were both exploratory and evangelistic. In the formative period of missions it was necessary to make surveys of the territory to be occupied and to plan carefully for future de- velopment. To reach the people it was necessary to speak in their tongue. Yet the educational approach seemed the best policy because it was gradual and would lead people to ac- cept the gospel intelligently. The press was of similar value with the school. The Bombay printing-house grew in size. A Marathi edition of the Bible was issued there, while the Tamil edition came from the Madras press. Textbooks and hymn books were printed for school and church use. Tracts in large numbers poured from the presses, and even- tually books for the increasing public who could read. And when difference of opinion arose among British missionaries whether it was better to teach the people of India through the vernacular or the English language, the Andover men were combining the two in their missions in Madura and Ceylon. Edward Webb, Andover, 1845, made a contribution that en- titled him to be called the father of Christian Tamil music, when in the Madura mission he took the native pagan music cultivated through the Sanskrit, discovered a native Christian
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poet who wrote Christian songs, and married the music and the poetry. From that time the native Christians enjoyed the musical part of worship. Out of the experience came the Madura hymn book with its hundred Christian songs, edited by Webb.
By the middle of the nineteenth century the missionary work in India was flourishing and new methods were being tried out. Central boarding-schools branched out into village schools, more preaching was undertaken, new churches were organized, the beginnings of self-support were made, and more dependence was placed on native leadership. Caste was a troublesome question, and attempts to check it were liable to wreck a mission. It required the wisest kind of leadership to know when and how to attempt radical changes in popular customs and ideas.
The missionaries who had gone to India early in the century were feeling the effects of long years of activity in a foreign country with a trying climate, but they kept steadily at their task. Winslow was prolific in his literary work for the Tamils, especially his Tamil-English dictionary. Spaulding passed the half-century mark in Ceylon, and lived until he saw the mis- sion the most thoroughly cultivated of any of the Congrega- tional missions. The greatest gain of the middle decades was the increasing self-reliance and participation of the Indian people in the development of Christianity in their country.
By 1880 the Marathi mission was ready to celebrate its semi-centennial. Eight stations, seventy-six out-stations, and twenty-four organized churches, with schools and an influ- ential press, were powerful factors in keeping the Christian religion before the people. The relief given by the missionaries during the years of famine created a wave of friendly feeling from which all the missions benefited. It was a time for con- structive work, especially through more and better schools. Andover alumni played no small part in the progress of all three of the India missions. Three men in particular were notable leaders of the period-Hume, Jones, and Washburn.
George T. Washburn was the oldest of the three. A Williams man and a graduate of Andover in the class of 1858,
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he went out to India in 1860 and became one of the strong pillars of the Madura mission, remaining to the end of the century. A novel contribution was the True News. He founded it in 1870, edited it, and issued it as a semi-monthly newspaper through the Pasumalai Press. He carried this on as a part of his duties for twenty-six years. His major work was educational, as president of the Pasumalai Seminary and then of the College.
Robert A. Hume was born at Bombay, the son of a mis- sionary father. After a college course at Yale and two years in the Divinity School, he completed his theological prepara- tion at Andover with the class of 1873, and then set sail for the land of his birth. Locating at Ahmednagar, he made that city his future home and there he established and built up a theological seminary. His constructive labors in that school and the variety of his active leadership made Hume the out- standing missionary in India. Besides his care of the Semi- nary he had the superintendence of the Parner district west of the city for forty years. He sent out more than two hundred personally trained evangelists and teachers, and many churches and schools and one thousand conversions were the result. He was at one time or another principal of boys' and girls' schools, and editor of an Anglo-Marathi periodical. In addition to the service of his own denominational mission he sustained the common cause of Christianity, serving on com- mittees of various organizations, and frequently as an officer. He was district secretary of the British and Foreign Bible Society, president of the All-India Christian Endeavor Union, and the first moderator of the United Church of Northern India, of which the Congregationalists were a constituent member. For his service in his administration of funds for famine relief in the closing years of the century he received the Kaiser-i-Hind medal from the British Government. On a furlough to the United States in 1904-1905 he was invited to give the Hyde lectures at Andover. These were collected and published under the title "Missions from the Modern Point of View," a book that took its place at once in the front rank of missionary publications. Altogether Hume saw fifty-two
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years of service. At the end as at the beginning he was the same simple, efficient, kindly man, fond of work with his brother men, and interested in the welfare of India even when his active ministry was over. He was one of the far-sighted leaders who helped the missionaries make the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century.
John P. Jones was Welsh-born, only six months younger than Hume. His college was Western Reserve and he gradu- ated from Andover in the class of 1878. He found his field of labor in the Madura mission, remaining there almost forty years. Soon after he had become acclimated and acquired a knowledge of the people and their language he was put in charge of the Madura mission, and from that time he was fully occupied with the direction of the evangelistic and edu- cational operations. He kept preaching in the forefront of activity, and saw that schools were planted when there was need. He founded the first Christian high school, and for twenty-two years was principal in Pasumalai. He managed the mission press. Like Hume he received the Kaiser-i-Hind medal for his efficiency in relief. He traveled all over India and Burma as president of the South India Christian Endeavor Union. He was the author of "India's Problem : Krishna or Christ," a book widely read.
It was the yeoman service of men like these which built solidly the Congregational missions of India. Nor was it in their leadership alone. Other men wrought effectively in less conspicuous positions, doing their part of the day's work. Among Andover missionaries during this period or not long before were James Herrick, who spent nearly forty years in the Madura district ; George H. Gutterson of the same mis- sion ; William A. Ballantine, a medical missionary ; Henry J. Bruce, who served decade after decade in western India, printing religious books and millions of leaflets ; and Edward Fairbank and Edward P. Holton, classmates at Andover, who each found a place for himself on the field.
The pioneer of the American Board in China was Elijah C. Bridgman, Andover 1829. When he arrived in the country Robert Morrison was his only predecessor. Studying with
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him when he was not permitted to preach, he prepared himself for education and translation, and he edited the Chinese Re- pository, a monthly established to inform English-speaking people about the Chinese. His later life was spent in Bible translation at Shanghai. Lyman B. Peet, after seven years on the threshold in Siam, settled in Foochow after the Opium War had opened the ports, and remained for a quarter of a century. Henry Blodget served in Peking and other cities for forty years, was one of the translators of the New Testa- ment into Mandarin. and translated books and hymns into Chinese. Chauncy Goodrich followed after he was through at Andover, and was in North China from that time. Isaac Pierson was twenty-one years at Pao-ting-fu. Henry D. Porter and Arthur H. Smith were both in the class of 1870 at Andover, and both spent long terms of service in the North China mission. Porter was trained in medicine, and was able to be of particular service in the famine of 1878. Smith por- trayed village life in China in his books, and was a leader in his mission. He lived until 1932. William S. Ament was a missionary at Peking when the Boxer Uprising occurred. He knew the need of military defence against those who hated foreigners and he was well aware that without money it was difficult to work very efficiently, yet he showed the devoted spirit of all the missionaries in that trying time when he wrote : "I would rather ride a little donkey from village to village and sleep on bricks at night, with the privilege of testifying of the grace of God and communicating a little hope to the dull lives of this people than anything else." William P. Sprague and James H. Roberts at Kalgan, Harlan P. Beach at Tung-cho, and Charles A. Nelson at Canton, also belong on the roll of Andover names in China.
The first Andover name in Japan is Daniel C. Greene, An- dover 1869. He commenced a mission in Kyoto, which be- came one of the centers of the work of the American Board in Japan. His is one of the prominent names in the missionary history of the denomination. The Missionary Herald, sum- ming up his career, testified: "Founder of the American Board's mission in Japan, one of the translators of the Scrip-
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tures into Japanese, educator, author, advisor to diplomats and legislators, father in the work to later missionaries, presi- dent of the Asiatic Society of Japan, and recipient from the emperor of Japan of the Third Order of the Rising Sun, the highest honor ever conferred on civilians living in the coun- try." He was a member of the committee on the translation of the New Testament, and for several years was professor of New Testament exegesis in Doshisha College. The Do- shisha itself is one of the trophies of American education. Because Joseph Neesima learned what American seminaries, including Andover, could do for him, he in his turn founded the college as a Christian university in Japan; and though for a time it lost its Christian character, it was a powerful in- fluence in interpreting Western culture to Japan. It was in 1874 that Neesima was at Andover engaged in special studies. In that decade Marquis L. Gordon commenced a thirty-year ministry at Osaka and Kyoto, two-thirds of the time a pro- fessor in Doshisha College; James H. Pettee was stationed at Okayama; and his classmate, Otis Cary, another of the makers of the Japanese mission, professor in the Doshisha, and interpreter of the Japanese Christians to America and England through his monumental history of Christianity in Japan. Later names of Andover men include Samuel C. Bartlet, Sidney L. Gulick, champion of the Japanese in their differences with the United States over immigration, Henry J. Bennett, and Enoch F. Bell.
Out in the islands of the Pacific David B. Lyman toiled faithfully for more than fifty years, and Benjamin W. Parker for forty-five years, part of the time in the Marquesas Islands and for the last five years of his life the head of the Hawaiian Theological Seminary. Mark Ives was in Hawaii fifteen years, and George B. Rowell exceeded that record by seven years. Elsewhere than in Hawaii it was dangerous business to explore and attempt to deal with cannibals. Lyman and Munson were killed in the Batak country in 1834. George Pearson was able to devote five years to Micronesia, where the American Board cooperated with the Hawaiian Evangelical Association in the farther islands. The savagery of the islanders was
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appalling, the distances were great from island to island. It was months between mails. But there never was a lack of those who were willing to make the sacrifice for the sake of the gospel of Jesus. The construction of the first missionary ship was a venture, but the contributions of the children of American churches and Sunday schools amounted to twelve thousand dollars, sufficient to meet the cost of the Morning Star; a farewell meeting was held in Park Street Church, Boston, for Hiram Bingham, Jr., Andover 1857, and his wife, and the new ship turned its prow to the South Sea. Twenty- one weeks later the ship arrived at Honolulu, where his father had wrought mightily for God. Then on to the Gilbert Islands, where the son took up his own task. Later he cruised among the islands as captain of Morning Star, No. 2, returned to Honolulu on account of ill health, but improved the oppor- tunity to prepare literature for the Gilbert Islanders, trans- lated the Bible, hymn books and his own commentaries into Gilbertese, and prepared a Bible dictionary.
Another Hawaiian missionary's son was Oliver P. Emerson, Andover 1871, who, after pastorates in the United States, performed secretarial service in Hawaii. Joel F. Whitney was his classmate, and he spent ten of the early years of his life in Micronesia.
The South Sea islands and the Far East had the lure of the far distance and the wide spaces; the Near East provided a better civilization, but with difficulties almost as great. The minds of the people were encrusted with the barnacles of their static formal religions. Ancient speculative dogmas and mean- ingless rituals had choked the life of the inner spirit. Syrian and Armenian, Greek and Bulgarian, each believed his own form of religion superior to the others, and the Turk scoffed sat them all as inferior to his own Mohammedanism. It was sterile soil for the missionary's seed, but he kept sowing it even if little sprouted. Andover men had a distinguished part in the patient cultivation of the nineteenth century. Seventy- nine names belong to the roll of honor of the Near East in Andover's one hundred years ; merely to list them is impossible.
Elias Riggs was one of those sturdy pioneers who never can
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be overlooked. Leaving the Seminary in 1832, he served an apprenticeship in Greece and then for fifteen years made his headquarters at Smyrna, preaching and preparing textbooks for the Greeks. A visit from two of the American Board at home awakened an interest among the Armenians, and changed the direction of missionary activity from the Greeks to them. In harmony with the new plan Riggs was transferred to Constantinople. Already he had learned Bulgarian, and subsequently he translated the whole Bible into that language. At Constantinople his workshop turned out biblical material, translations and dictionaries, grammars and commentaries, in Turkish, Bulgarian, Armenian, and Chaldee. Busy as he was, he hardly counted the years as sixty-seven of them rolled by until at last the toll of them was over and he was laid to rest in 1901. In all that long time he visited America but once, when his health compelled, and then he superintended the electrotyping of the Armenian Bible in New York City and taught Hebrew at Union Theological Seminary. Though ab- sent he was not forgotten, and American colleges fitly hon- ored him with academic degrees.
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