Forty Years in South China: The Life of Rev. John Van Nest Talmage, D.D.Fagg, John Gerardus
Religion
Forty Years in South China: The Life of Rev. John Van Nest Talmage, D.D.
Fagg, John Gerardus
Missions -- China; Talmage, John Van Nest, 1819-1892
Dr. Talmage was not perfect. He was essentially a humble man, and he would
be the first to tell us that of every sinner saved by grace, he was the
most unworthy. And when he said it, he felt it. And he had not the very
most distant idea how great a man he was. Sometimes one fears that this
very modesty pushed to an extreme prevented others who did not know his
life and his work from accurately gauging his real work. Better perhaps,
he would say, that it should be so; better to think of the work than of the
workers. To hold up Christ and to be hidden behind Him is the highest
privilege of those engaged in the service of this King. And this, his
uniform bearing, made him all the greater.
DR. TALMAGE-THE MISSIONARY.
It would be useless speculation to lay down here what should be the special
qualifications of a missionary to the Chinese. The better way is to find
them in the concrete, so far as you can do so in an individual, and set Him
forth as an example for others. The friend of whom we write would
deprecate this, but it is the only way in which we can see him as he was
and account for the singularly prominent place he occupied amongst us.
I do not need to say here that he was a man of faith and prayer, earnest
and zealous for the spread of Christ's Kingdom; in the face of difficulties
and dangers, of disappointments and failures, maintaining an unwavering
faith that the Kingdom must come and would yet rule over all.
He had both an intense love for his work and enthusiasm in carrying it on.
He came with a definite message to the people to whom the Master had sent
him. There was no apologizing for it, no watering it down, no uncertain
sound about it with him. Christ and Christ alone can meet the wants and
woes of humanity,--Chinese or American or British. He had no doubt about
it whatever; and hereby some of us learned that if we had not this message
it would have been far better for us to have stayed at home. And this
feature marked him all over his course. You felt as you listened to his
pleadings that sin and salvation were terms brimful of meaning to him. He
had traveled this road, and all his pleadings seemed to be summed up in the
one yearning cry, "Come with us and we will do thee good." "This is a
faithful saying and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus came into
the world to save sinners." And he would have gone to the end, "of whom I
am chief."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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