USA > Tennessee > Davidson County > Nashville > The First Presbyterian Church, Nashville, Tennessee : the addresses delivered in connection with the observance of the one hundredth anniversary, November 8-15, l9l4 > Part 2
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Is this church as safe in our hands as it was in the hands of preceding generations? Are we as devoted to Christ's cause? Are we as quick to see what is needed and as ready to meet it? Are we as bold to plan and as faithful to exe- cute? Is personal piety as fine? Are family altars as com- mon? Are we as diligent in giving our children religious instruction ? Are we as reverential in the observance of the Sabbath, as regular in our church attendance, and as con- cerned for the salvation of souls? Is the stock in this old church improving or petering out? I leave you to answer, and pray that God may give us vision and faith! May this centennial season be a time of revival! O for the faith of Caleb! Let us believe that what God has promised is as securely ours as what He has already bestowed, and let us live accordingly. Let us push on. We have a mighty God. and in His name we can get the victory. Hebron has been given us. Are we the people to take it? God help us to say we are! Be it ours to maintain the traditions of this church, to keep the banner flying, so to live and labor that now, and in the years to come, our Zion shall merit the "Well done!" of God and man.
"Up! Let all the soul within you For the truth's sake go abroad;
Strike! Let every nerve and sinew
Tell on ages, tell for God!"
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CHAPTER II.
OUR WORLD OBLIGATION. By REV. EGBERT W. SMITH, D.D.
I esteem it a privilege to take part in the celebration of the one hundredth anniversary of this historic church. It is fitting that foreign missions should have a voice in this celebration, because for a quarter of a century this church has been a larger factor than any other church in the mem- bership of our Foreign Mission Committee and in the con- duct of its great work. Your gifted pastor is Chairman of our committee; for eight years one of your good elders has been Chairman of our most important sub-committee ; your church is furnishing us our mission rooms rent free, and your contribution to this cause now amounts to between five and six thousand dollars per annum. In the name of our whole committee, therefore, I bring you our most grateful greetings and the assurance of our prayers that your future may not dim but diadem your past.
It is always interesting to trace the course of a mighty river back and up to its fountain-head, to stand beside some crystal spring as it wells up from the earth's deep heart and say, "Here starts the stream whose waters fertilize and bless a continent."
To find the fountain-head of foreign missions, whose waters centuries ago brought life and healing to our people and are yet to overspread and bless the world, we must go back and up till we reach-the heart of God.
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Across the seas of ether God the Father looked and beheld our little far-away foreign planet in its sin and misery and want. His great heart responded to our needs, and the first ship that ever bore a missionary away from the love and light of home to carry the Gospel to a foreign shore sailed from the port of Heaven. It bore Jesus Christ. It was sent by God the Father. "God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son."
It is this world-love of God that inspires, pervades and shapes the entire plan of redemption. The individual or the church that has only a personal outlook or a parish outlook or a national outlook, has yet to learn the true aim and glory of our Christianity.
Away back in the early chapters of Genesis we hear God saying to Abraham, "In thee shall all the nations of the earth be blessed." David understood it, "That Thy way may be known upon earth, Thy saving health among all nations." Isaiah understod it, "Look unto me and be ye saved all the ends of the earth." The angel at Bethlehem understood it, "Behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy which shall be to all people." Jesus Christ understood it, "The bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world." In that pattern prayer which He taught us, before we ask for the daily bread on which our bodily lives depend, before we ask for the forgiveness on which our spiritual lives depend, we are to pray, "Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, in earth, as it is in heaven." That amazing sacrifice of His on Calvary, for whom did He mean it? Let scripture answer, "He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world."
And you remember that final scene on Mount Olivet. The Saviour has finished His atoning work. He is on the resurrection side of the grave. He is about to return to His Father's house. Around Him are grouped His Jew-
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ish disciples. They are thinking only of their own land and their own race. They are asking only about "the restora- tion of the Kingdom unto Israel." But the Saviour's great heart took in heathen America as well as sacred Judea. He was thinking of pagan Europe, in whose forests our ancestors were roaming about in half-naked savagery, as well as of favored Galilee. So to those Jewish disciples. He said, as His final and supreme command, "Go ye into all the world; make disciples of all the nations; preach the gospel to every creature."
So we see that the world-wide missionary enterprise is no incident or afterthought of Christianity. It is the origi- nal purpose of Christianity. It is that for which God gave His Son to die. It is that around which cluster the most thrilling scenes, the most solemn sanctions, the most glo- rious promises, the most binding commandments, of our holy religion.
If we believe that in Christ alone is found the truth that satisfies the intellect, the power that regenerates the life, and the hope that illumines the future; if we believe that to men's need of Christ there is no exception, and to His power to save them there is no limit; if we believe that He is the gift of the Father to all. that He died to make atonement for the sins of all, that He has been lifted up to draw all men unto Him, then we must believe that the church's first duty, the church's chief business, is to give the knowledge of this Saviour to all mankind.
To this conclusion of scripture and reason our own be- loved church says Amen. When our Southern Presbyterian Church was organized in December, 1861, in the city of Augusta, Georgia, that first historic Assembly adopted the following declaration: "The General Assembly desires distinctly and deliberately to inscribe on our church's ban- ner, as it now first unfurls it to the world, in immediate
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REV. OBADIAH JENNINGS, D.D., Pastor 1828-1832.
connection with the headship of our Lord, His last com- mand, 'Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature,' regarding this as the great end of her organization."
Any church whose congregational life is not adjusted to this missionary end is like a ship whose prow is placed at the side or rear of the vessel. A scriptural church puts first things first.
Some years ago in Michigan a missionary speaker noticed in his audience a woman whose whole appearance spoke of deepest poverty ; but there was a light in her faded face which fascinated him. He took occasion to speak to her. "Two years ago," she told him, "I learned for the first time of this foreign missionary work, and each month since I have been able to put something in the treasury." Her bent form straightened and her eyes shone as she con- tinued, "When I have made my offering I am conscious that I am no longer simply a part of this little town, or even of this great Commonwealth ; I am a part of the forces which God is using for the uplifting of the nations." There we have God's own antidote to that spiritual littleness and narrowness which is the chief temptation of the Christian life.
There is nothing that so develops, broadens, elevates and ennobles a church or an individual as identification with a great cause. Many a church is like a steamship trying to navigate in a mill pond. No great port to reach, no wide sea to sail in, no vast horizon for the eye, no large responsi- bility for the mind, nothing but a dull routine of little things to occupy the passengers and crew-no wonder they become narrow and selfish, and their mission and pos- sibilities as a church are left tragically unrealized. Let us never forget that every church, however small, and every
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Christian, however humble, is a ship built by Christ for a world voyage. Its home is to be the great ocean, its hori- zon the earth's rim, and its port the discipling of all na- tions.
But our world obligation involves more than a supreme task ; it involves also a sacred trust.
The Bible declares over and over again that we are put in trust with the gospel for the world. The unsearchable riches of Christ we do not hold as a piece of private prop- erty, but as a trust fund for the benefit of all nations. The Bible calls us not owners, but trustees, stewards, of the grace of God. To neglect a task is one thing, to betray a trust is a far darker thing, whose punishment is that of the unfaithful steward whom his lord put out of the steward- ship.
Why did the Christian churches of the early centuries lapse into what are known as the Dark Ages? Because the church turned its God-given candle into a dark lantern. Because it said, "So long as I see the light I care not who is in the dark." North Africa and Syria and other lands, to which missionaries are now sent, thirteen centuries ago were starred with Christian churches. But they became self-absorbed. They forgot their missionary character. And God removed their candlestick out of its place.
But we need not go outside the Bible for illustrations. In His own Book God has given the modern church a vivid warning.
What was it that exalted the Jews above all the other peoples of the earth? It was the fact that to them was given the knowledge of God. The long effort of God with that people was to train and fit them for certain offices which they were to render to mankind. As God said to Abraham. "In thee shail all the families of the earth be blessed."
We believe in election, but we do not interpret it as
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God's taking one nation or individual to his heart to be petted and pampered and made a favorite of to the exclu- sion of all others. We rather think of it as God's choosing one of His nations and molding it, training it, fusing its life into transparency, that it might be capable of transmitting him and His blessing to all the rest. That is what divine privilege means. If God elected you to spiritual life and light, be sure He was thinking of you not as a terminal but as a channel, not as an absorbent but as a radiator, not as a favorite but as a steward.
The tragedy of Jewish history is that the distinguishing privilege granted this favored people bred in them such a spirit of selfishness that when Jonah found that God was about to have mercy on people who were not Jews, he fell into a rage; and when the Jews at Jerusalem heard Paul say that God had commanded him to go unto the Gentiles, they cast dust into the air and cried, "Away with such a fellow from the earth !"
The supreme sin of the Jews, the sin of which the re- jection of Christ was but the effect and the expression, was this: The most sacred trust ever committed to human keeping, the knowledge of God, they held as a piece of pri- vate property, they used as a personal luxury. And the history of the Jews ever since, the most awful history of blood and tears of which the race holds record, is simply the judgment of God, writ large for all the world to read, on the sin of the unfaithful steward.
But that is ancient history, you say. Not at all. All about us at this moment are Judaisms of intellectual culture, Judaisms of social privilege, and, worst and commonest of all, Judaisms of religious light.
Here is a man excellent and indeed admirable in many respects, a good neighbor, a kind father, a reputable church member. He is a highly privileged man. His lot is cast in a land of Bibles and churches. His home is bright with
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Christian faith and love and purity. His future is glorified with an immortal hope. The graves of his loved ones are rainbowed with the prospect of reunion in the Father's house. Thrice happy man! But when you tell him of the nations that still sit in darkness, waiting, dumbly waiting, while the slow centuries pass, for "that Light whose dawn- ing maketh all things new," he listens with a deadly apathy Poor little Jew! The most sacred trust on earth, the trust of religious light, he has turned into a personal luxury. "Provided I have the light," he says, "and my little circle, I care not who is in the dark."
What that little Jew needs above all else is what that other Jew, of Tarsus, needed-a vision of Christ. When Paul caught a view of Him who loved and who died for all men, in the blaze of that ineffable, all-embracing love, the old Jewish selfishness in his heart withered and vanished away and in its place was born a new sense which became the motive power of Paul's life, the sense of a trust, the divine principle of stewardship. Because God had en- trusted him with the precious knowledge of Christ, he owed that knowledge to the whole world. "I am debtor," he cries, "both to the Greeks and to the barbarians, both to the wise and to the unwise."
Not till we have learned the spirit of stewardship, which is the Spirit of Christ ; not till we can say with Paul, "I am debtor," have we passed from Judaism into Christianity.
You have read of the awful Irish famine of 1845. Men and women were lying dead on their cabin floors. Babies were starving on the withered breasts of their dead moth- ers. Many lay dead in the fields, often with blades of grass between their white teeth. When the cry of famishing Ire- land reached America. instantly a great ship was filled with provisions and sent. speeding across the Atlantic. Suppose the crew of that ship. instead of going to Ireland, had gone off on a pleasure cruise, visiting distant and delightful coun-
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tries, feasting for weeks and months on the provisions in the ship, while the poor Irish stretched out their fast-thin- ning fingers and prayed and pined and starved for the bread that never came-what would have been the sin of that crew? Simply this, the sin of turning a sacred trust into a personal luxury, of all sins the most prevalent in the church today and the most paralyzing to the progress of Christ's Kingdom.
And this is no fancy picture. In China today our mis- sion schools are turning away applicants for lack of room ; our churches are crowded to suffocation, while the sur- rounding villages are begging, and begging in vain, for teachers and preachers. "How can we know?" said an old man recently to one of our missionaries. "We live in a vil- lage where no one ever comes to teach us. How can we know?"
Our Congo Mission is receiving delegations, often seven or eight a week, from native tribes, sometimes hundreds of miles distant, begging for a man of God to be sent to them. But each of our workers is already doing two. or three men's work. When these messengers are told this they often refuse to be refused. They sit down on the ground sometimes for twenty-four hours, hoping against hope, be- fore taking up their long journey home. One distant vil- lage, in expectation of a teacher, built a church, which has long since rotted down unused.
That famine scene is no fancy picture. The non-Chris- tian world is stretching out its hands to us for that Bread of Life which Christ has given us in trust for them, com- manding with His last breath, "Take it into all the world and give it to every creature." We have multiplied minis- ters and churches for ourselves till in this Southland we have one Protestant minister to every four hundred and seventy people, and one Protestant church to every three hundred
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and nineteen, while over yonder millions are yet groping in utter darkness. Are we turning a trust into a luxury ?
"Through midnight gloom from Macedon The cry of myriads as of one, The voiceful silence of despair Is eloquent in awful prayer, The soul's exceeding bitter cry, 'Come o'er and help us, lest we die !'
How mournfully it echoes on! For half the earth is Macedon.
These brethren to their brethren call, And by the Love that loves them all, And by the whole world's Life they cry, 'O ye that live, behold we die!'
Jesus, for men of man the Son- Yea, thine the cry from Macedon- O, by Thy Kingdom and Thy power And glory of thine advent hour, Wake heart and will to hear their cry, Help us to help them, lest we die !"
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CHAPTER III.
GREETINGS FROM REPRESENTATIVES OF OTHER CHURCHES.
From the Methodists. By PROF. THOMAS CARTER, D.D.
I count it a very high honor, my friends, to be present on this happy occasion and present to you the greetings of the Methodists of the City of Nashville, of the State of Tennessee, and of our entire Southland. There are over two millions of us, and we are by nature, by choice, by grace, and by predestination an enthusiastic and to some extent a vociferous division of the army of the Lord. Hence you will readily see that it is well-nigh impossible for us to compress into a bare five minutes one tithe of the good-will we feel or one one-hundredth of the congratulations your great church deserves for having attained with such signal success and high honor the centennial of its founding. If there ever was a time when there was need for the power of a Joshua to cause the sun to stand still and the moon to loiter in her flight over the Valley of the Cumberland, it is tonight, when we of other churches come to felicitate you upon the round- ing out of your threescore years and forty.
I do not presume to speak for these other brethren in this matter, but we Methodists feel that we must take our own medicine. We have always made much of what we call our time limit, and even to this day some amongst us stoutly maintain that it is one of the best devices ever hit upon by the wisdom of the fathers for
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avoiding any embarrassment arising from an undue prolongation of ministerial loquacity. Are we to infer, sir, that in the adoption of this on your part we are to find one more bond that unites the spiritual children of John Calvin and John Wesley? At any rate we salute you and yet express the hope that by the time the next centennial rolls around the time limit will have been done away with in both churches and we shall all be allowed to work and talk as long as we like!
First of all, then, we bring to you our sincere con- gratulations on the marvelous numerical growth this church has had during its lifetime of a hundred years. Time and time again have we read the statement that it was a little band of seven that gathered together on that never-to-be-forgotten November day a hundred years ago and constituted the charter group of this church, which, under the guiding hand of God, has grown to seventeen or eighteen hundred members. Be- tween that day of small beginnings and this day of large accomplishment who shall enumerate the multiplied thousands that have been communicants at these altars? Truly their name is legion and their register is kept in the general assembly and church of the first born which are written in heaven ; but if we believe in the apostolic article with regard to the communion of saints they, too, are here tonight sharing in our joy and joining in our service. But they have joined
"The choir invisible Of those immortal dead who live again In minds made better by their presence."
We congratulate you, in the second place, on the noble band of leaders-the Christian preachers and prophets of the Lord who have been called to fill this pulpit during the century that has gone. Twelve dif-
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ROBT. H. MCEWEN, Elder 1829-1868. Clerk of Session for Thirty-five Years.
ferent pastors-thirteen pastorates in all. Of these ten have passed on before-only two abide-one like Caleb -whose career was so cogently set before us yesterday, is a "come-back." But all of them we recognize as the gifts of the ascended Christ. Some were apostles, some prophets, some evangelists and some teachers-all gra- ciously given for the perfecting of the saints unto the work of ministration. To have been the channel through which such men as Campbell, Hoyt, Edgar, Witherspoon and others of like mold, should deliver their message to their age, is an honor that may well stir the heart of any church to honest pride; and no sister church is worthy of the name that does not share your joy in the noble line of leaders you have had.
But we Methodists do not forget that you are Pres- byterians and that in your ecclesiastical economy the minister-no matter how able or eloquent-is not by any means the all in all of a church's leadership. We call to mind that you, in line with all Presbyterianism, have made a distinct contribution to the democratiza- tion of ecclesiasticism in the emphasis you have ever put upon lay leadership. We congratulate you, therefore, upon the many noble laymen who, by reason of member- ship in or official relation to this church, have lived lives of godliness and devotion and inspired by civic conscience have made a century-long contribution to the Christianization of this community and this Common- wealth.
We congratulate you again on the fact that for a full century you have maintained here a great worshiping and working church where hundreds, yea multiplied thou- sands, have found rest from their labors, light and lead- ing for their perplexities and salvation from their sins. The inscription on the seal of your church-Lux lucet in tenebris-is to us most significant. For here on this
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much-frequented corner, where whirl and rush the tides of a busy city's life, you stand, where you have stood for a hundred years, with a beacon light to warn men from the rocks of sin, with a clarion voice to call them to their better selves, with a hand of strength and sympathy to help them on to God.
Finally, brethren, we congratulate you upon the spirit of progress, of fellowship and of Christian com- ity that has ever characterized this church. In fact, we Methodists, along with other evangelical bodies of this community, are fast coming to believe that we are well nigh as much at home here as you yourselves are. This attitude we have arrived at through no arrogant assump- tions on our part, but wholly by reason of that insistent and gracious hospitality on your part which has made this great church the clearing house of the Christian ac- tivities of our city. It is here that we have met and mingled in efforts to advance cooperative work along all lines-in Student Volunteer Conventions, in Socio- logical Congresses, in the great Bible Conference of a year ago-in all these gatherings, and many more, we have come to know and profit by the spirit of Christian cooperation you so preeminently exemplify.
Arminians though we be, your absolute antipodes in doctrinal statement, we find that here we are all one in Christ. Therefore, we greet you in the name of our common Lord and Master ; we greet you in the name of the common task that summons us to labor ; we greet you in the name of the common heritage we have as children of illustrious forbears: we greet you in the name of the common Spirit whom we all share as Guide, as Comforter and as Sanctifier. We Methodists give you our glad greeting on this the occasion of your hundredth anniversary and pray that this may be a great week in your career as a church-a week when the splendid his-
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tory of a century with all its momentum, shall be gath- ered up and baptized by holy memories, and consecrated faith and loving sacrifice shall thrust you forth into new and larger fields ripe even now for the garnering of our God, and may the future hold for you a far more glo- rious history than even the thrilling story of your past century supplies.
From the Disciples of Christ.
By REV. CAREY E. MORGAN, D.D.
I read with peculiar interest Dr. Vance's centennial sermon of yesterday morning. It will not be out of place, I think, for a brother minister to say in this pulpit that that was a great message and that it prepared the whole city to measure more accurately the significance of this centennial week to you and to all of us who believe in our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. 1692044
I have come over to rejoice with you and to bear to you the greetings of my people. We are a few years younger than you and have church fellowship with a far younger communion ; but I hope you will not think it presumptuous when I say that we hold ourselves to be kinsmen of yours. Our fathers were Presbyterians ; two of them, Thomas and Alexander Campbell, were Scotch Presbyterians and were educated in Scotch Presbyterian universities. Barton W. Stone, whose Christian leader- ship laid the foundation for our present strength in the middle country, was for long years a prince in your Israel. We have the blood of the Covenanters in our veins. I myself like to remember that the roots of my own faith, through my ancestry, were nourished in Scotch-fertilized North of Ireland soil.
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