Editorial November 28, 1908 Issue

THE MISSIONARY SPIRIT

Annie M. Knott

A very significant gathering has recently been held in Boston under the auspices of the "Laymen's Missionary Movement," and representing five of the religious denominations of this city. A motto which was displayed on a banner at their gatherings read, "The world for Christ in this generation," and one of the speakers expressed the hope that the brotherhood of all mankind would as quickly become an established fact. Much emphasis was laid upon the efforts of laymen in the great work of evangelizing the world, and one of the speakers remarked, "The real problem of Christian missions is not in China or India, but here, in your heart and mine;" while another said, "I have come to regard the American and the Eastern heathen as one and the same, except that the one is heathen from choice, and the other can't help it."

This gathering may well remind us of the dawn of Christianity, when the most active workers were laymen, holding no priestly office, and despised and condemned by those who did hold such offices, because of their departure from ecclesiasticism, which was wrongly held to be the faith of their fathers. These early workers did not represent the authority of either church or state, but they did express the authority of divine Truth in overcoming both sin and sickness, and Peter's great missionary address before the Sanhedrim, defending with boldness and eloquence the right to heal the sick as commanded by the great Teacher, a right denied by that august and learned body, is one of the great utterances of history. He even raised Dorcas from the dead, and it thus came about that the healing truth spread from city to city, then from land to land, for the word was spoken, as the Master had said it should be, "with signs following." In the course of time it came to pass that these "unlearned and ignorant men" had emperors for their auditors, for they were epistles of Christ, "known and read of all men."

In no other church are the efforts of laymen called forth as in the Christian Science church, for it has no ordained priesthood, all its members being privileged and expected to "preach the gospel," as did the Galilean fishermen, by healing the sick and by living Christly lives. No one can deny that if all the professing Christians who have gone to foreign lands for commercial purposes had proved their religion as did Paul when shipwrecked on the island of Melita, these lands would long since have been won for Christ.

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