Bible Truths Illustrated by J. C. Ferdinand Pittman

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BIBLE TRUTHS ILLUSTRATED
578. If our religion is not true, we are bound to change it;
if it is true, we are bound to propagate it.
Whately.
579. "In the early days of the foreign missionary movement,
a preacher in America said he would not give one Illinois farm
for ten thousand Chinese converts. Another preacher praised
'the happy ignorance of the untutored savage.' 'When an attempt
was first made to introduce the gospel into India, one of the
directors of the East India Company was heard to declare that
he would rather see a band of devils in India than a band of
missionaries.' In presenting a petition to Parliament, the East
India Company said :
'The sending of missionaries to our eastern
possessions is the maddest, most extravagant, most unwarrantable
project ever proposed by a lunatic enthusiast.' A high
official said to a missionary : 'The man who would go to India
as a preacher is as mad as a man who would put a torch to a
powder-magazine.' Sir Edwin Arnold, upon being asked what
he thought of the prospect of India's conversion to Christ, said
*You might as well try to sweeten the Atlantic by throwing
cologne water upon it' Think of the wonderful change of sentiment
in our day! Many years ago, a young minister, in commencing
labours with a church, preached upon Foreign Missions.
At the close of the service one of the elders approached him, and
in freezing tones remarked : 'Our former pastor used to protect
us from such calls/ That elder should have done the honourable
thing, and quitted, like his old pastor, providing he did not
inflict his views upon some other church. A few years ago a
president of a meeting held in South Australia said: 'If the
evangelistic committee only understood their Bibles as well as
I do, they would send no more missionaries to foreign lands.
The heathen are a law unto themselves!' We should rejoice
that, in our day, the great majority of preachers and professing
Christians believe that world-wide evangelism should be our
objective."
580. At the Centennial Convention of churches of Christ at
Pittsburgh, in 1909, J. Campbell White, secretary of the Laymen's
Movement, New York, told of a Chinese theological
graduate who asked his bishop if he could make a request about
the field. The bishop was surprised, but said : "Usually no
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