64 - Author's Biography

LECTURE IV GEORGE BOWEN, THE CHRISTIAN MYSTIC AND THE ASCETIC IDEAL

IF any Christian of modern times is worthy to be set with Raymond Lull, it is George Bowen. There have been missionaries who accomplished more than either of these, but there have been few who combined in the same unique way the spirit of absolute self-sacrifice, extraordinary intellectual abilities, unresting energy and a love for the personal Christ as passionate as Peter’s and as steadfast as John’s, whose faith moreover stood unshaken against discouragement, and rested with confidence upon the certainty of things not seen. It is less of an injustice to these great men that they should be unknown to our generation than it is of loss to us that we should miss the courage and spiritual incentive to be found in their lives; lives, in Bowen’s case at least and we may believe in Lull’s also, as closely resembling the earthly life of Christ as any lives that men saw in their times, as any lives that we see in our time. The centuries remove Lull from our personal acquaintance but some are living who knew and loved Bowen, and his influence is still so clear and characteristic that many of us who never knew him have yet felt him and in the truest sense touched his soul.

"George Bowen was born in Middlebury, Vermont, April 30, 1816. His father in after years was a wholesale merchant, an importer of dry-goods in New York. The father, much attached to his family, was of a literary turn of mind and collected an excellent library, by which his children greatly benefited as they grew up; but his desire for George was that he should acquire a good business training, succeed him in business and become a successful merchant.

"At the age of twelve, George Was withdrawn from school and taken into his father’s counting-house. After that, he never attended either school or college. He read with avidity the books in his father’s library. At fourteen, he took lessons on the piano, and when about sixteen years of age a great passion for music took possession of him, and for a dozen years he cared for nothing more than Italian operatic music. During this period, his evenings were spent in the acquisition of French, Italian and Spanish, in which languages he became quite proficient.

"About the age of eighteen, he became very much dissatisfied with the career which his father had appointed for him, chafing under his repugnance to a commercial life and lamenting the meager educational advantages which he had enjoyed. In October, 1854, he received his father’s grudgingly and ungraciously accorded permission to retire from the mercantile life which he had followed for nearly eight years, resolving to devote himself con amore to literary pursuits.

"It was a short time before abandoning forever a mercantile career that he became a sceptic, or, as he prefers to call himself, a disbeliever. An enthusiastic admirer of Gibbon, charmed with the dignity and suggestiveness of the great historian’s style, he easily persuaded himself that Christianity was destitute of all well-founded claims to be regarded as a divine system. In the course of a year or two, he read the works of Volney, Voltaire, Shelley, Hume, Bayle, and others of kindred minds, the result being that he settled down into a calm and confident acceptance of an especially cold type of Deism."

We have in Bowen’s reminiscences an account from his own hand of these sceptical days. "There was a young man," he writes, "very fond of reading, who at the age of seventeen was led to doubt the truth of Christianity by that chapter of Gibbon in which he attempts to account for the spread of the Christian religion in the world. He was acquainted with several modern languages, and read in these the principal works in which Christianity is assailed,- Volney, Voltaire, Diderot, and a number of others. He soon persuaded himself that Christianity was not a revelation from God, that there was no revelation, that there might be a God and probably was, but there was no life to come, and there could not be a more futile employment than prayer. His mind was made up on the subject, remained absolutely unshaken and unwavering in unbelief for eleven years. He occupied himself with literature all these years, and naturally read a great deal that tallied with his views; whatever did not, made no impression upon him, and he only wondered how people could be so simple as to believe things so preposterous and baseless. With a single exception, no one ever addressed him on the subject of personal religion, it being thought by those who knew him that the fixity of his views was such as to make the task hopeless. To a friend who once addressed him on the subject of religion, he replied by a letter the character of which may be gathered from the quotation which he placed at the head of it, ’Thinkest thou that because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale? Ay, by St. Anthony and ginger shall be hot in the mouth too.’ At a later period, Strauss came in his way, and what surprised him was that the German should take such prodigious pains to disprove that, the falsity of which lay, as it seemed to him, on the very surface."

"In the summer of 1836, George, accompanied by the other members of his father’s family, went to Europe, the period immediately preceding having been marked by sundry manifestations of his liberty-loving and enthusiastic spirit. . . . Several years of wide-spread travel in Europe, including a year or so of fast life in Paris, followed. His journal contains extensive notices of the places of interest visited. They are most attractive reading, fascinating at times in their exquisite depictive power. Freely interlarded we find reflections and philosophizings of a most audacious, irreverent and ofttimes blasphemous character. Here is a characteristic extract from his diary of April 16, 1837: ’Saw the sea at Terracina and ruminated on the beach, cigar in mouth, over the vicissitudes of human events and the nothingness and nonsense of my own existence. It is a great boon that God should have taken into His head to put this spirit, soul, essence of mine into a human body and make a creature of me,’ and more in the same strain. A deep, overflowing pessimistic current flows through all his writings of those unhappy years of alienation from God. ’My destiny’! he says, ’inglorious and mean; a bubble that breaks from the flood in the night-time, no sun nor moon to paint it with gay hues.’ About fifty pages of his journals of these years of European travel are covered with notes of books, mostly German and French. ... He states that he read eighty German volumes in six months of 1838, some of which he translated into blank verse as well as prose.

"In 1839, we find the subject of our narrative in Upper Egypt, greatly delighted with all that he there saw, with eyes ever open for the beautiful, the ancient and the humorous. Later in the same year, he passed over to Palestine, where he spent the months of August and September, and after visiting Turkey, Greece and Italy, we find him once more in Paris at the end of the year. The early part of 1840 welcomes him back to New York, whither his relatives had preceded him. . . .

"In a few months, we find him commencing and abandoning the study of law because of difficulties and disinclination, and finally beginning the composition of a work of fiction, the scene of which was Rome, the epoch the early part of the sixteenth century, and the principal personse the distinguished artists and literati of that day. After returning to America, he continued to be an omnivorous reader. ... At this time, he became enamoured of the pantheism of Spinoza and Goethe, chiefly on the ground that it shifted all the corruption of humanity over upon God, naturing and natured. His poetic genius found generous vent at this time also. The effusions, mostly in blank verse and covering a wider range of subjects, reveal a high order of imagination and a deep philosophic insight into the nature of things. In 1842 Mr. Bowen read no fewer than 150 large volumes, on 105 of which he made extensive notes!

"It was in this year also, that Bowen made the acquaintance of a lady who was destined to exercise a greater influence upon him than any other living person. Beautiful in person and endowed with rare charms of mind and manner, his whole life was bound up in her. In his journal for July, 1843, he speaks of four days of incomparable enjoyment spent in her company, ’les plus beau jours de ma vie,’ and indulges in many daily flights of what he terms ’rhapsody and idolatry.’ In December of the same year, she was smitten with what proved to be a fatal sickness, and he was overwhelmed with grief.

Bowen’s fiancee died on the morning of January 26, 1844, forty-four years almost to a day before his own death in Bombay. He wrote in his diary, ’’There remains nothing now but the constant, perennial, hourly necessity of such preparation as shall ensure the earliest meeting in that exalted sphere to which she has gone." On February 4th, he records that he received her dying gift, a copy of the Bible, "with words of benediction on the clasp and an injunction from her to read it daily and also to attend the house of God." He obeyed this injunction out of simple devotion to her but before long the great transformation came to him. It will be best to let him tell the whole story in his own words:

"After eleven years of profoundest infidelity [he says of himself] he had his attention drawn to the career of the apostles, and to the evidence afforded by the extraordinary labours, sufferings, successes of these twelve men, that Jesus of Nazareth had already risen from the dead and ascended up on high. His attention had, however, been previously drawn to a remarkable fact which seemed to show that the same Jesus who was crucified many centuries ago had power to accomplish things upon the earth at this day which no mere man could accomplish.

"There was a young lady dying of consumption in a certain city. She was surrounded by all that could make life attractive, and it seemed, especially to the one who was much bound up in her, one of the saddest conceivable things that she should go down to a premature grave. She herself would have gladly lived; there was a hope in life that death could not offer. There was in the same city, a lady in whose school she had been a pupil; this lady incidentally heard that her former pupil was dying and not prepared to die. She went to see her but was not allowed access to the invalid; she would not, however, be denied but persisted and almost forced her way to the sick chamber. The Lord blessed her ministrations, and she was enabled to show the patient her need of the Saviour and to lead her to Christ. Then was all fear of death removed; the desire to live left her; the hopes that seemed to irradiate this life shifted to the life to come, but elevated and enriched a thousandfold; a sweet peace possessed her soul,, and she died rejoicing in the assured conviction that she was going to be with Christ. Whatever grace and beauty seemed to belong to her in health were eclipsed by the spiritual grace and loveliness that invested her last hours as with a halo. There was one who would have given all his interest in life to impart the least alleviation to her pain, to have diminished in the least the sting of death; but he was made most painfully conscious that this was utterly beyond his power to accomplish. Now the fact that arrested his attention was that Jesus of Nazareth Who had been so long disregarded and scorned by him should come to the dying one and give her peace and sweet content and joy in the assurance of a blissful immortality; here was something marvellous and inexplicable. He was bewildered. The effect wrought corresponded only with that which only the sublimest truth, in connection with a present divine power, could accomplish; it was the removal of the sting from death, the bringing of life and immortality to light, the opening of a door into a glorious and holy heaven; and all this heightened by contrast with his own utter impotency and total penury of help.

"A Bible, bequeathed to him with a dying request that he would read it, he received with thankfulness and proceeded to obey the injunction. He read it and found much to admire in it; valued it for the comfort it had bestowed upon another; but he never for a moment doubted that he was right in his views regarding it, or suspected that it was really a revelation from God. One night, just before retiring-this was in March, 1844-he said aloud in his room, ’If there is a God that notices the desire of men, I only wish that He would make known to me His will, and I shall feel it my highest privilege to do it at whatever cost.’ He had been brought to see that there was nothing more desirable than for a man to be conformed to the will of an All-wise Creator, and also to feel that there must be some divine guidance in order that he might know that will. But immediately after that ejaculation, the thought arose, ’How foolish to suppose that God will occupy Himself with our desires!’ However, the sequel showed that God was pleased to hear that bewildered cry, that could scarcely be called a prayer. Two or three days afterwards he went to a public library from which he was accustomed to take out books, asked for a book, received one, put it under his arm and returned home. The distance was about two miles. When nearly home, he looked at the book and found to his surprise that it was Paley’s ’Evidences,’ a very different book from the one he had asked for. He could not go back to the library that day, and had to keep the book until he had an opportunity of returning it. He would not read it. He knew all about the evidences of Christianity. He had long ago finally settled that question. Before putting it away, however, he glanced at the first sentence and was arrested by it: ’I deem it unnecessary to prove that mankind stood in need of a revelation, because I have met with no serious person who thinks that even under the Christian revelation we have too much light or any degree of assurance that is superfluous. Let it be remembered, too, that the question lies betwixt this religion and none, for if the Christian religion be not credible, no one with whom we have to do will support the pretensions of any other.’ He read one page and another and another, was pleased with the style and candor of the writer, and at last sat down and read a good portion of the book. To his surprise he found that he was beginning to take a new view of the evidences, and then shut up the book and put it aside, afraid of being surprised into any change of belief. He went away for a few days into the country, and on his return resolved to read the book carefully and calmly, and see if there was really any reason to believe the Bible to be from God. When about half-way through the book he offered the prayer ’ Help Thou mine unbelief.’ When he had reached the last sentence, his doubts were all removed; he was perfectly convinced of the truth of the Scriptures. He turned to Gibbon and read again the chapter which had first led him astray and saw its sophistries and the weakness of its arguments most clearly. The Bible was now God’s book, but he did not believe that it contained the doctrine that men pretended to find in it; he would read it for himself, and by himself, and see what it really taught. But he had had a great lesson and felt that humility best became him; he would read it in an humble spirit and whatever he found there, he would receive, no matter how repugnant it would be to his own ideas. Day after day, alone in his room, communicating to none the change he had experienced, he read it and by degrees found there the very doctrine that he had so much disliked. He found that he was a sinner, that he needed a Saviour; that a Saviour was offered him. He took this Saviour, yielding himself to His entire direction. He was led on publicly to confess his faith in Christ, and after some years he became a missionary in India."

It was within three or four weeks of his conversion that Bowen fully resolved to be a foreign missionary. He became an attendant at the Mercer Street Presbyterian Church, of which Dr. Skinner was pastor. He was not a man who delayed duty and he went on at once to public baptism on profession of faith, on June 9,1844. There are great diversities among men in this regard of promptitude of character. Some suppose that there is virtue and especial assurance of divine guidance in delinquency. A man who has been moving upon one course of action preparing for the practice of law or contemplating some Christian service in America, regards his pursuance of this course as supplying so powerful a presumption in its favour that he cannot bring himself to make a change without long delay. In the colleges and seminaries, one often hears warnings against the dangers of hasty decisions in the matter of missionary purpose; as a matter of fact the contrary danger is ten times greater. After all, a decision is made in an instant. It may have taken weeks or years to come up to it and the consequences are eternal, but the decision itself was instantaneous. Bowen was no delinquent. When he saw, he did. Will instantly caught up the movements of conscience and moral judgment and solidified them in action. His later life in this regard resembled the beginning. He promptly obeyed every gleam of new and as it seemed to him larger duty. When he had formed his missionary purpose, Bowen spoke to Dr. Skinner and others about it. He had supposed at first that " there would be nothing to hinder him from going at once just as he was, with his Bible under his arm." He was advised however to go to the Union Theological Seminary and accepted the advice. He had had no college course, so he studied Greek at once alone, and began without delay active Christian work. He led a Sunday-school class, and "worked a district as tract distributor and earnestly sought to equip himself for his life-work under the guidance of the Holy Spirit and judiciously advised by kind friends." It is worth while to observe George Bowen’s readiness to receive help from others. All his life, he was a man of positive opinions, who saw his duty for himself and did it, but he was a man amenable to reason, who checked his own disposition by revelation of duty through others.

About the time of his entering the seminary, he broke off the habit of smoking, without solicitation or suggestion from any one. The habit had become very firm and enthralling and he simply resolved to throw it off. He succeeded in delivering himself by using for a time, by set purpose, the cheapest and worst tobacco. With tobacco Bowen stopped profanity and cut off absolutely all use of intoxicants, "believing that the spirit of the New Testament favoured total abstinence."

He was constantly drawing his life up to the highest. That purpose will settle a hundred little questions of habit and practical living for men. Men who are of mediocre spiritual ambition can find adequate reasons for petty squalor of personal habit and can live with their moral self-approval on a plane that would be impossible to them if they asked not, "Must I give this up?" but "May I not free myself from this also and enter into a larger liberty?"

During his seminary course, Bowen was constantly at work. He did not postpone missionary service because his present sphere was not as large as the sphere he contemplated. He realized that the only possible preparation for many kinds of work is to do them, and to be a winner of souls in India ten years in the future he knew that he must be a winner of souls where he was. There is no spiritual alchemy in a sea voyage that will make a missionary out of a man who is not already one before he goes. During his summers, Bowen worked with his friend and fellow student Mr. Ford, afterwards a missionary in Syria, in Pike County, Pennsylvania, visiting the farmers, offering books in behalf of the Bible and Tract Societies, talking about Christ and praying from house to house as there was opportunity. In the seminary also, he was a Christian of the sincerest type. He did not coquet with the world. He lived his religion. Young men in theological seminaries speak of the difficulty of maintaining warm spiritual life in the atmosphere of the seminary, and there have been students in such seminaries who seemed to regard the deeper religious duty as irksome and who evidently were postponing for a time the full practice of the Christian life. Men and institutions vary and one generation is worse or better than its predecessor, but there is room enough still in all our seminaries for men who will live as Bowen lived. He was not the type of theological student that he was through the calculation that he must be that type if he would later exert the largest positive spiritual influence, but later he was the profound spiritual power that he was in India and throughout the world because of that character in him which had expressed itself in sincere and earnest Christian living and working in the seminary. Men do what they do because they are what they are. Absolute freedom of the will is an untrue doctrine. We see around us every day its refutation in the determinism of character which we find whenever we will look in ourselves and in all men. And there is no greater folly than to suppose that men can prepare themselves flippantly for life and not enter life in consequence with flippant characters, destitute of the power of lofty sacrifice or spiritual sensibilities like George Bowen’s. "While at the theological seminary," says the Rev. J. E. Robinson, "he was in the truest sense a missionary, ever seeking the conversion of souls in the outside world, as opportunity served, and also helping many a fellow student into the full enjoyment of the gospel salvation. He was the leading spirit in the prayer and experience meetings among the students, in all things and at all times seeking first the kingdom of God, while at the same time a diligent and conscientious student." In the seminary those deeper experiences of the Christian life began with Bowen which were to issue in the singularly powerful spiritual character of the future. The 4th of December, 1845, is noted in his journal as the beginning of a new era in his life and spiritual experience. Of this he writes in the third person.

"Nothing in heaven and earth astonished him more than the discovery made on that day that Jesus was his sanctification, and that all he had to do was to abide in Him as the branch in the vine, and the goodness of Christ would sway him moment by moment, and it would always be Christ’s goodness and not his own, for there is none good save one, that is God. . . . When the discovery was made, he was filled with wonder, love and praise, but also with a sense of the need of perpetual vigilance, lest at any time he should forget his absolute dependence on Christ. He felt that he must watch against everything which could in any way weaken his sense of dependence. He felt that he was under law to Christ in eating, drinking, sleeping, study and conversation; that he must habitually stand ready to cut off a right hand, to secure the continued realization of Christ’s love. All self-denial now became easy; the sense of God’s love filled him with joy unspeakable, and he valued nothing more than the opportunity of expressing his own love in return." On April 19, 1847, he preached for the first time in the pulpit and he preached three times. He ’’ was sustained," he writes, "but was disappointed in the results . . . yet favoured in one respect; freedom from reflex acts." Throughout there was in him a rich combination of deep introspection and of calm faith in the objective facts of salvation in Christ.

Having been duly accepted and appointed by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Mr. Bowen left New York for Boston, July 27, 1847, and embarked from the latter port on an ice-ship four days later, Mr. and Mrs. Wood his only fellow passengers, being, like himself, bound for Bombay. At once he began to work among the crew, earnestly seeking to lead them individually to Christ. He also began the study of Marathi. These days on shipboard were days of prayer and heart-searching and growth in grace. God was girding him for his forty years’ service in Bombay. His faith was growing exceedingly as he learned Christ. He read many works of religious biography and history during the voyage. In his journal for December is a remark which may be regarded as the key to his whole life. "It appears to me now," he writes, "that the highest style of Christian in God’s sight is one who lives in the wise exercise of all his powers, sparing himself not at all, doing all to produce great and immediate results, yet esteeming that in God’s favour is his life repining not, when there is no appearance of fruit, and willing to be thought unprofitable by the Church."

Bombay was reached January 19, 1848, after a voyage of 172 days.

Bowen at once took up the language, employing two pundits, each of whom gave him an hour and a half daily. The spirit of the man is shown in a sentence or two from his letter of March 31, 1848, to his friend, the Rev. William Aikman.

"I was thinking this morning that here thirty-two years of my life had rolled away, and I had not yet begun to live. That is, to work-for to work is to live. All my past life has been a long and strangely circuitous avenue to my present position, a wandering maze whose issue God alone discerned. Only to think of it, thirty-two solid years cast away, and who knows whether my allotted time is not comprehended in them. Surely if any individual should resolve to do with might what his hand findeth to do, that purpose should be mine. But after all it is not time that, we want so much. If the choice were now offered me to live twenty-five years with my present measure of grace, or to live six months with that measure of the Spirit’s influence which I sometimes crave from God, I would certainly choose the last. Yes, I believe that three days with the baptism of the Holy Ghost will be of more value to this unhappy world than the longest life of mediocre piety." From the beginning, Bowen’s remarkable journals are fall of reflections on all questions of missionary policy, especially one of great interest in which Bowen was the forerunner of many later earnest missionaries who felt the constraint of the same spirit. "From the very first," he writes of himself, "the idea of a very simple style of living, approximating that of the natives, was before his mind, and he freely expressed his conviction that one way in which the gulf between the natives and Christian missionaries might be bridged was by the latter ceasing to occupy in worldly respects a superior position to the former. His conviction was deepened by the perusal of Edward Irving’s famous missionary sermon, preached before the London Missionary Society some time previously." At the outset of his missionary life, however, two temptations came to him to leave the work, before he had opportunity to develop his theory about the manner of a missionary’s life. One temptation sprang from the sense of duty to his mother and sisters at home left unprovided for by the death of his father, who with his two sisters had become believers the same year with himself. Many men in Bowen’s position would have seen in this providence a warrant for return to America, and some doubtless justly; but there are many to whom such temptations come merely as trials of faith and new discipline into robustness of character. Bowen felt this news to be just such a temptation to him and trusting God to solve the problem of the family’s support, he remained in India, saving, however, about twenty dollars per month out of his salary to aid his mother and sisters. I believe myself, not that too much is made of family ties,-that would be impossible-but that they are allowed too much to hamper Christian work and that many men and women plead as an evidence of exemption from missionary work claims that in God’s sight and the light of such high moral principle as ruled Bowen’s life are not valid claims at all. The other temptation sprang from the condition of his health. In August, 1848, he "was prostrated by an affection of the liver and of the windpipe. He declined very rapidly, insomuch that he was given over to die by his physicians and all who saw him. He himself even wrote home announcing his approaching death. A few days after doing so, he began to mend, and his physicians urgently advised that he leave the country immediately. This, however, he refused to do, hoping that the Lord would eventually fully and permanently restore him. The Lord saw fit to order it so, and the one who was declared by able physicians, under their hands and seals, to be absolutely unequal to further residence and labour in India, lived and laboured with indefatigable energy for forty years, without lengthy sea voyage, furlough, residence in the hills, change of climate, or other means generally considered indispensable to prolonged stay in the tropics." The various means employed for the maintenance of physical health and spiritual tone in mission fields such as those just mentioned are wise and necessary, but they can be both under and overused, and it is a good thing often to turn back to the lives of men like Bowen and Judson and see how vigorously independent these men were of them, and how with them the work was supremely first, and puny questions of a few months’ extra furlough, or this or that other small comfort, beneath their world. Bowen was right and wise too, in refusing to leave lightly the work for which he had been sent out, even with a physician’s certificate advising his return. When missionaries once reach their fields, at great expense to the home Church and presumably under the guidance of God, no light reason should bring them home. Often there must be physical readjustment, but as an old missionary lady in China once said to me, "Let the new missionaries go slowly. They may not be as well here as at home, but if they can live here at all, let them stay. They will get broken in if they have patience and courage." Bowen refused to leave the field and he lived and worked in India for forty years.

Remaining in India, he took up the two questions of the mode of life of the missionary and his spiritual example and influence. He wrote in his journal, "I want to have Christ walking about the streets of Bombay as He did about those of Jerusalem and living among this people as He did among the Jews. He was emphatically the friend of the people. They were His family, His home. ... I want to have Jesus the Missionary in my mind’s eye continually. It will be a blessed day when I feel at home in these streets and can linger in them without any desire save to continue preaching the Word. . . ."

"It was strongly borne in upon his soul," says Bishop Robinson, "that it was his duty and privilege to authenticate his divine commission to the ignorant people among whom he toiled with so little success by ’ signs following.’ The references in his journal are scanty and somewhat vague, but it seems that after days and nights of prayer and study of the Word, he on one occasion essayed the healing of a sick or disabled person by a command of faith and was signally unsuccessful. He was greatly humbled and confounded, but God held him in the hollow of His hand, and he suffered no eclipse of faith. He never, however, abandoned the conviction that the miracle working power was recoverable by the Church and ought to be an adjunct for missionary labours among idolatrous peoples; but we do not find any further attempts on his part to manifest or exert this power, though he appears to have sought it with prayer and fasting and many tears." The practical measure which he soon came to believe it his duty to adopt was the surrender of his salary and the attempt to live among the natives in a style of simplicity and renunciation of earthly comforts to indicate the utter unworldliness of the motives of the missionary and the disinterestedness of his aims. In January, 1849, after having been in the country one year, he wrote a letter to the missionaries throughout India, urging his views. It would doubtless be regarded as more presumptuous now in a missionary yearling to do this than it was then. The body of missionary practice and precedent has grown and solidified greatly in these years, but Bowen’s course was rash enough. His own actions, however, were not to be determined by what others did. As he writes: "By the grace of God! I will put myself in a position where all men shall see that I am the disinterested servant of Christ. By the help of God, I will honour the Gospel and conform myself to it with all strictness." In accordance with this purpose, Mr. Bowen, on February 13, 1849, resigned his missionary’s salary, amounting then to ninety rupees per month, left the mission house, and took up his abode in a little room of an old pensioner’s mud-walled house near Waree Bunder, under Nowrojee Hill, in the midst of a community composed entirely of Portuguese and natives. The house has long since been swept away and the whole neighbourhood altered. His journal of this date has the following: "At length, thanks be to God, I am in that situation which I have so long desired to be in. The Lord did not more truly guide me to India than He has guided me to this humble spot. Were the Apostle Paul in Bombay, I should be far more content in receiving him where I now am than where I have hitherto been. . . . On opening my Bible the first text that met my eye was, ’Now there was found in it a poor wise man, and he by his wisdom delivered the city.’" In his later reminiscences, he refers quietly to this self-denial, again speaking in the third person: "After spending about a year in India, he was led to believe that his influence would be greater if he were not in the receipt of a salary from a missionary society, and since January, 1849, he has received no salary from any quarter. For some years he earned his livelihood by giving an hour daily to private tuition; for a still longer period, he has trusted to the Lord to supply his need, without such occupation. It is unnecessary to say that he has enough and to spare." This work of private tuition lasted for twelve years. Thereafter, he depended as he says upon the Lord, the earnings of his editorship of the Bombay Guardian probably not relieving the Lord greatly! But what a curiously un-Christian conception this is! It was the Lord supporting Bowen through the American Board as truly as through small charities in Bombay. The fact that the sparrow goes out and gathers his food does not in the least alter the fact that it is the Lord Who feeds the sparrows. What Paul earned from the sale of his tents, it was the Lord Who gave him. The use of means and effort on the part of believers does not diminish at all the reality or the immediacy of the Lord’s influence and active present care. George Bowen depended no more on the Lord than Bishop Thoburn, or Dr. D. L. Anderson of Soochow depended on Him. Bowen may have felt that he was more directly dependent upon God, but many other men may have as great a feeling of dependence who yet see the Lord’s hand giving them what comes through the missionary agency with which they are connected. Doubtless, many do not depend upon the Lord who use means and organization; but the use of means and organization is not responsible for their want of dependence. That is their inner spiritual deficiency. Dependence upon the Lord makes some means unjustifiable, but not the use of means. The missionary organization which most emphasizes the thought of direct dependence upon God and which shows forth the beauty and sufficiency of such dependence is probably the most diligent society in the world in making known its work, publishing books about its history, and setting forth the vast needs of the field which it is endeavouring to reach. Instead of doing wrong in this, it is pursuing the most Christian course possible. It does not believe that depending upon God requires cessation of effort or disuse of means. In Bowen’s case, doubtless the surrender of all regular support did help to strengthen the sense of immediate dependence upon God, although it did not increase at all his real dependence. He hoped also that it would greatly increase his missionary influence. In later years, he often confessed that he was greatly disappointed as to the effect which he had expected would be produced upon the natives by his course. And as a general rule of missionary conduct, Bowen’s plan is not practicable. "Living as the natives" is not a clear proposal. Which of the natives? In mission fields in Asia and South America, there are all sorts and grades of natives. As to naked Africans, the rule is obviously impossible. But as to India, it is equally so, if by native is meant the poorest class. The physical constitution of the Western man cannot live on that level. Centuries of heredity lie back of the Indian villager who lives with his family on two or three dollars a month, and whose household furniture and wearing apparel could be purchased for five dollars. "Living on the level of the native is not a matter of consecration," as one missionary put it; "it is a matter of stomach," and it simply cannot be done. At the other extreme, of course, there are Hindus and Mohammedans in India who live as princes. It is true that the missionary lives far above the level of the class of natives with which he associates, but that is a simple physical necessity.

Furthermore, as a rule, the effect of trying to live on the level of the poorest of the Indian fakirs or holy men is not what the theory assumes. Bowen, who never got down to that level, admitted this. It is not manner of living that wins or repels in Bombay or in Nashville. It is the spirit of heart and life represented in the manner of living, and Hunter Corbett, living simply but as the requirements of health and efficiency necessitate, draws nearer to his Chinese and has won more of them to Christ than Bowen did in Bombay among his Hindus and Parsees.

"Living like the natives" is a much used phrase among missionary critics and independent missionaries. There is a good deal of unreal fetichism about it. The germ of truth which it contains is the truth at the bottom of the whole missionary enterprise, the truth of the Incarnation itself. To reach people, we must go to them, love them, win their love, draw as close to them as we can. To do this, simplicity, frugality and perfect sincerity of life will be necessary. That is all. And this is a lesson for us as well as for the missionary. For the question of moral and economic principle involved is the same here as there. In America as truly as in India the doubt must often come to men as to whether they should not literally forsake all and follow Christ, give away their property, lay up no money, adopt the practice of St. Francis of Assisi and go out absolutely free, without a burden or a tie, save the love of Christ. The inequalities in the distribution of wealth are so glaring and so terribly unfair. The economic system is so obviously unsatisfactory. The multitudes of the needy are separated so widely from the affluent and the luxurious. Even among the merely well-to-do the scale of living is so overwrought and the complexity of life so confusing. Why not cut loose from it all by the one decisive surrender of asceticism? "Let us do it," said Tolstoy. Well, we cannot, for a score of reasons. We have our children. We have no right to exact of them the toll for our spiritual and economic vagrancy. We are in an order and we must redeem the order and not run away from it. We have a whole world of nature and of men to save and we may not go off alone to save our own souls. The solution of asceticism is too selfish, too irresponsible. But if we reject this ideal, we can do so only by the more earnestly accepting the law of service which sees in all that we have, not a personal possession, but a means of human ministry and a trust to be administered for Christ and for men.

Bowen’s renewed consecration of his life and his effort to lay himself completely upon the divine care was followed by days of anxious inquiry and earnest desire for unequivocal manifestations of the power of God to accompany his preaching of the Gospel to the nations. "He spent hours of the nights in prayer, fasted for long periods-in one instance for a fortnight-and in response to a profound impression, made upon his mind in meditation on the character of Christ, he gave away every penny he had in the world. The 20th of March of this year, 1849, proved another important era in his spiritual life. He writes of it as the greatest day in his whole life. ’I entered,’ he says, ’upon a religious experience far higher than any before attained to. Its characteristic is self-annihilation and a wonderful revelation of God in the place of myself.’ The immanence of God in his natural creation, the absolute dependence of the creature upon God, the power, wisdom and goodness of God as exhibited in the works of His hands, were unfolded to his mind in a manner that filled him with unutterable joy, peace and love." In the spirit of this new experience, deepening year by year, Bowen carried on his work in Bombay. In 1851, the Bombay Guardian was established with Bowen as an associate editor. After three years, he undertook whole charge. The paper was discontinued for a time, but later was revived and his singular abilities made it a paper of great power, his connection with it continuing through the rest of his life. His literary work included much more than the Guardian though that was enough. My friend, Mr. Henry W. Rankin, in sending me a valuable set of the bound volumes of the Guardian for the last ten years of Bowen’s life, wrote of them, "They not only contain the reminiscences (of Bowen’s early life which he wrote under the pseudonym of Homunculus in the third person) but his invaluable editorials on an immense range of subjects, political, philosophical, ecclesiastical, discovery, the ethnic religions, the Brahmo Samaj, and all other experiments of eclectic religion in India. The papers contain," added Mr. Rankin, "a consecutive commentary on all of John’s Gospel and all of Revelation. They are crowded with the richest ore of gold and seamed with beds of diamonds."

How rich Bowen’s comments on Scripture were, all know who have read his three best known books, "Love Revealed," "The Amens of Christ," and ’’ Daily Meditations.’’ Many books of devotion have blessed the Church, but few have blessed more hearts or helped them more deeply than these sincere, noble-minded outpourings of Bowen’s experience of the love and life of the loving and living Christ.

Beside his literary work and doubtless transcending it in importance, in Bowen’s view, he was constantly preaching. In 1854, he wrote to Dr. Anderson of the American Board, "I continue to preach in the streets and wherever the people so congregate that I can quietly talk to them. Occasionally, I am maltreated or am mobbed. But I do not suffer my mind to dwell on those occasional unpleasantnesses." In 1871, William Taylor, known all over the world as Bishop Taylor, began his mission in India and Bowen at once gave him his hearty support, becoming one of the leaders of the Methodist Episcopal Church and devoting to it his great talents thenceforth until his death in 1888. Bishop Taylor regarded Bowen with deep reverence, saying once regarding him to Dr. Aikman, "George Bowen was the Lamb of India." And whether or not the people for whom he lived and died, always with the spirit of the Lamb of God, responded to his message, they did respond to his love. The editorial which appeared in The Times of India, on February 11th of the year he died, 1888, though coming from Englishmen and appearing in the leading secular English paper of Bombay, yet expressed the general feeling of the entire community. The editorial is too long to allow the quotation of more than a few sentences.

"The death of the Rev. George Bowen, the tidings of which passed rapidly through our city on the 5th inst., has deprived this community of one of its oldest and most widely honoured members. The sorrow awakened by his unexpected removal is not confined to any one section of the Christian Church, or to any one class of the community. One who has for forty years occupied a unique place as a missionary among us has passed away, and the sense of loss is intensified by the feeling, present doubtless to the minds of all who knew him, that the place of George Bowen will always remain empty. His was a work and a personality sui generis, and in the ordinary acceptation of the word, he can have no successor. The removal of George Bowen marks the close of an epoch in the history of our community.

"George Bowen was a man of rare individuality. In any community this individuality would have asserted itself, but in a community like ours, in which the conditions of society so manifestly tend to the leveling down of all men to the same tone of thinking and action, a man who could stand alone, who could mould his life according to his own high convictions of responsibility, and who felt bound by no artificial standards, could not but stand forth as a conspicuous personality. Hence it was that many a visitor passing through our city, intent upon noting not merely the outward features of our life in Western India, but also the moral forces which are at work among us, sought out before all things the humble dwelling of this saintly man, that they might be brought in contact with something of the inward movements that are silently moulding the life of the community.

"He retained throughout his new life all his breadth of culture, and no circumstance or surroundings, however humble, could dwarf the moral and spiritual dignity of the man; on the contrary, they only served to render it more conspicuous. In his most humble dwelling, he could entertain the humblest and make him feel welcome; but in the same dwelling the highest had no consciousness of the exceptional surroundings and no feeling of condescension in the presence of one who received them with true gentlemanly courtesy and dignity. The same breadth of nature was conspicuous in his relations with men and with churches.

"Mr. Bowen’s whole life was a testimony to the disinterestedness of his aims; but special instances of it were of frequent occurrence.

"The life of such a man could not fail to make a deep impression on all earnest minds in this community. We have no doubt that many of our native fellow citizens have felt its influence, and some of them have not been slow to acknowledge it. We know of many amongst our own fellow men who owe all that is best in their lives to their contact with him and of others who were made better through their reverence for his character.

"Reality and self-forgetting sympathy were the most marked features of his character, and these are the qualities which most inspire confidence and affection. His was a nature incapable of affectation and free of all self-consciousness.

"Through forty years, that life has been amongst us, from its very character mingling little with the busy currents of public movement that have been flowing onwards, guided by other aims and other plans; and yet we cannot but feel poorer that a life so rich in noble purpose and lofty aim has passed away from among us. Gladly and ungrudgingly, therefore, do we offer this tribute of honour to the memory of one who neither loved nor sought it while he lived."

George Bowen’s method of life and work was not an absolute method. There is nothing in the Scriptures which makes it prescriptive and while the spirit of his life is the right spirit for all workers for Christ and for men, experience did not demonstrate that his methods were the only methods or the most effective methods. They were probably much more effective than Bowen himself believed. He referred with some despondency at times to the apparent fruitlessness of his work, but at his funeral, Mr. Hume, speaking of the great indirect influence he wielded over the natives of Bombay, mentioned "cases which had come under his own observation of heathen who had been brought to Christ through the holy life of him who for forty years had been before the people as a living example of the saving, keeping, sanctifying power of Christ as no other man had been."

Those who deny the absoluteness of Bowen’s method are in a position of real peril, however. We may easily turn back from such self-sacrifice into a spiritual easiness and self-indulgence which are fatal to the highest power. It may be feared sometimes that over-reaction from the ascetic ideals of earlier days will carry us too far. Those who say, "We will not fast with the outward fast," easily forget that fast of the heart which is the gate of God. Those who would ’’ use this would without abusing it" find that road, though the right road, very slippery. After all, it is better to err on the side of robust sacrifice, of completeness of self-denial, and to give up all literally, rather than under the plea of moderation to cover over a love of the world, or of pleasure, or of ease which is the death of holiness and of the might of God in a man.

Bowen was no narrow-minded ascetic recluse. "It is too common in these days," says Dr. Mackichan of the United Free Church of Scotland, in his preface to a little sketch of Mr. Bowen, "to look upon every form of high devotedness as the offspring of a certain onesidedness, verging on fanaticism, the result of excess or defect in some emotion or faculty in minds otherwise rational and well furnished. We have little doubt that the popular conception of George Bowen’s life amongst those who had but slight contact with it was not very different from this. The study of this sketch of the life which it unfolds will show how far such conceptions fall short of the realities of the Christian life. It exhibits the development of a mind singularly free from the enthusiasm of mere emotion, broad enough to be able to assimilate the best elements of the culture of other times and other lands, and strong enough to retain its own originality in the midst of all the influences which crowded in upon it." Bowen was a man of rarest intellectual and moral strength of character, large natured, easy, conscious of balance and poise, yet so humble and modest that these qualities were continually hidden so far as their possessor could hide them from conspicuous gaze. "We had Bowen dining with us last night," says a Bombay English civilian, "and I only wish some reporter had been behind the scene to take a note of the ’droppings.’ . . . Oh, I wish you had been with us. You would have been elevated when listening to Bowen discoursing on these wondrous themes. A meek, lowly, despised man, but oh, how happy! living in that miserable hut in the bazaar, holding converse with his God. Hunter is greatly enamoured of him, the more so because he is very musical. Last night, before going away, he played an accompaniment on the piano to Hunter’s violincello; ’Weep not for sorrow.’ You need not be surprised if you hear of both of us taking up our quarters with Bowen in the bazaar at ten rupees a month.’’ And one who knew Bowen long and intimately in Bombay is quoted by Dr. Hanna in his biographical preface to the Scotch edition of "Daily Meditations" as writing: "If expressions of the deepest reverence, admiration and affection were all that is required, I should not be found wanting; for, taking him all in all, I have always thought him the most delightful and remarkable Christian man I ever met. He was at one time an infidel. Afterwards he gave up friends, country, fortune (his father was a rich man), and consecrated himself and his whole life to the service of Christ among the heathen. You know how he has laboured for so many years, night and day, in Bombay; how he preaches every day to the native population; and you also can tell how great has been his influence for good on the Europeans there. For many years, he actually lived in the native bazaar, and among that sadly degraded population, until asked to become secretary to the Religious Tract Society, at whose depot he now resides, managing the affairs without fee or reward, in addition to his other labours. Probably it has added to his weight in the consideration of the English section of the community, that he is a most accomplished and highly intellectual man, having travelled much in Europe at one time; knowing French, German, Spanish, Italian and I don’t know how many other European languages, in addition to Hindustani and Marathi. Many years ago he used to try and enlighten my dear brother in the mysteries of astronomy; and his musical powers are quite remarkable. It is seldom any one has an opportunity of testing them; but on meeting him one evening quietly, after hearing him play a long and difficult piece of music, I asked him for a repetition of part, when I was surprised to find that the whole had been impromptu improvised as he went along. Perhaps one should add that in spite of Mr. Bowen’s abundant labours, little visible fruit has been the result. His standard is scrupulously high and rigid. Other missionaries have frequently baptized natives instructed and impressed by his teaching. I asked him once if he did not feel discouraged. ’Thank God,’ he said, ’I can truly say I have never experienced such a feeling. This thought, "In Thy favour is life," swallows up all others. It is enough for me.’ I believe eternity alone will reveal the amount of his unconscious influence and reveal the bearing his noble self-sacrificing life has had on the hearts of others." A good deal of this wider range of life in his missionary days was doubtless due to the manner of his life in his youth. God would surely prefer to get His men unmarred, but if they come marred, He takes all that was innocent in their past and turns it to power. It was so with Raymond Lull and it was so with George Bowen. He kept much from those early days and he let much go. Mr. Rankin sent him a copy of a romance which Bowen had written as a young man, entitled, "The Pupil of Raphael" and which he had published through Putnam. "I am reading it," Bowen wrote, "but have no desire that anybody else should read it . Not a single incident or a single character remained in memory. There are portions of it that I regret exceedingly, showing the effects of Balzac’s writings. I am glad that the Lord so completely snuffed the book out. Above all, I am grateful that He has saved me from myself." An outstanding characteristic of Bowen was his reality. The Times editorial emphasized this. All who knew Bowen felt it. Dr. Mackichan refers to it: "George Bowen’s conversion from unbelief to faith was a spiritual movement to which every part of his nature gave consent, and the life which followed was the harmonious expression of his whole being thus raised to a higher plane by the revelation of God in Christ. That reality which is referred to in this sketch as the leading characteristic of all his religious life, was the result of this transformation. All he did in the service of the Saviour Who had revealed Himself to him was done with the calmness, the resolution, the rationalness of one who found in the atmosphere of a consecrated Christian life his soul’s true element. . . . And this reality was the secret of the joy and beauty of his self-sacrifice. There is a kind of self-denial which is ever conscious of itself. But his was true and beautiful in proportion as it was free from this selfish taint." No faintest shadow of un-candour, of hypocrisy, of professionalism, darkened George Bowen’s life. He was what he appeared. He appeared what he was. And he tried to be and to appear what he ought. A bad man may claim to possess the virtue of reality because he is really bad. But Bowen believed that the only reality of life is the right adjustment of itself to God and goodness and he strove thereto. And men were influenced by him through his reality. The missionary finds sincere men among Mohammedans, Hindus and Buddhists, not men who are living up to all the light they have, but men who honestly believe what they profess and in human measure live by it. The same thing in the missionary will not convince them that he is right and themselves wrong. His type of reality must be larger and fuller. He must be sincere and honest and true but the truth which he represents must be the complete truth, the divine element, and his reality must mean the adjustment and coordination of his life to that.

Bowen’s spiritual fervour and devotion did not blind the accuracy of his intellectual judgments. There is a pious goodness, which desiring to speak evil of no man, is derelict in its testimony to the truth and defective in its defense of righteousness. Bowen was the soul of charity but he was the servant of the truth and he did not sacrifice truth to amiability. "I am convinced," he wrote to Mr. Rankin, "that Chunder Sen was more intent on his own glory, throughout, than on that of Christ. He honoured the Christ of his own conception, the Christ that was plastic in his hands, to be moulded as the Hindu national pride demanded. There was no unconditional surrender to Christ at any time. The Christ that he favoured was one that would give greatness to Chunder Sen." This was Bowen’s spirit in the study of comparative religion. He was not deceived. He saw the truth clearly, unobscured by the immoral tolerance of a false liberalism, and the truth he saw he spoke. Because he was good, he was not "gullible," to use Vivakanda’s adjective in expressing his judgment of the American people. All religious expressions were not the same to Bowen. Some of them rested as he had told his pundit at the beginning on a foundation of untruth. There are false religious elements as there are true and they are not to be mixed indiscriminately. As with all great religious leaders, so with George Bowen, his doctrine grew out of his experience. I have spoken of this in Lull. It was equally noticeable in Bowen. "You will have seen," he writes to Mr. Rankin, "that I wrote something about the Trinity. The Bible does not undertake to explain it to us. What it most positively teaches us is the Trinity of God, and what is said about the manifestation of God in Christ is never treated as though it conflicted with that in any way. We get at the right conception of these things not so much by intellectual effort, as experimentally. As we grow up into Christ, we apprehend Christ. There should never be a shadow of a doubt in the mind (there never has been in mine) that in honoring Christ we honour the Father." On the same subject, he writes later, "I have no trouble or confusion as that you speak of in regard to the persons of the Godhead. I conceive of God as absolutely one, yet have no difficulty in apprehending God in Christ and God the Spirit in me. Without this trifold manifestation I have never known God. There is more approach to a mystery in the distinguishing between the Christ of God and His brethren fully redeemed, in whom too is all the fullness of the Godhead. John fell at the feet of one of these. But I suppose there will be practically no difficulty. He is always the Saviour and they are always the saved. John 17:1-26. and Ephesians 3:1-21., etc., show that we must get where Christ was when about to ascend. The more fully we are conformed to Him, the better we shall understand all things." Bushnell solved the mystery of the Trinity in the same way and in the end we shall find that what theology is unlivable will be difficult of permanent propagation in mission fields. Religious value is not the right criterion of truth, but the truth whose religious value is not known and evidenced in our own life we shall find it hard to communicate to others. His deep Christian experience, his attempt to make his Christian life real and his shrewd knowledge of the heart, led Bowen to anticipate by many years that form of Christian teaching identified now largely with the Keswick convention for the deepening of the spiritual life held annually in the English lake-country. Whatever excrescences there may be, the main teaching of the Keswick conference is simply the Gospel of the redeemed life in Christ. As Bowen put it in his "Daily Meditations" (for December 30th), "You believe in Christ and not in yourself; in His goodness, not in yours; in His power and wisdom, not your own; in His word, not in yours; in His work, not in yours; in His sufferings, not in yours; in His prayers, not in yours. When a man believes his vessel to be on the point of going to pieces, and is hailed by another that is seaworthy, you will quickly find him removing all his goods from the first to the other one. His faith finds unequivocal utterance in his conduct. And he that believes in Jesus Christ makes haste to get everything that he values transferred to Him." And he writes in 1880 in a personal letter: "The best use we can make of our past sins is to turn from them to Christ. Anything that diverts our attention from Christ does us harm. This and that sin may appear very odious to us, and are so truly, but with God the most odious sin is that of not accepting His offer of love. . . . There is not the slightest use iu trying to correct anything amiss in our mental habits by direct efforts. We get the victory by faith, i. e., by ceasing to combat them and making them over to Christ. Do not even be impatient with these evils. Nothing so discomfits Satan as when you praise the Lord (2 Chronicles 20:20)."It is an intensely interesting thing to see in church history how the teaching of Christian men regarding the higher spiritual life repeats itself from age to age and how the heresies of the earlier days arise recurrently, and especially in both matters in connection with missions. The wisest and most practical attempts of today to feed the hungry human soul, Bowen anticipated. It is to be feared that sometimes the technical theological schools little realize how deep the hunger is or for what it longs. The summer conferences which testify to its existence and attempt to allay it are too often left beyond the sympathy and interest of the school. But we may be sure that these conferences exist because of a need and to some measure succeed in meeting it. It is not so much clear theological doctrine that these hearts crave as the sense of assurance, the secret of peace, the way of a larger life, something more than the conventional teaching gives, or the conventional standard requires. What Bowen said is just what those who attempt to meet these higher spiritual demands are saying today. "I live in hope," he writes to a correspondent, "that you will send me word some day that you are believing these words of God to ’whomsoever’ and banish that sense of condemnation and all vain thirsting. Whatever your nature really demands for its highest development is in that word ’eternal life.’ I wish that you could make up your mind that nothing more is ever to come to you from God than has come to you, and give your attention to what has come to you and is ignored by you. It was a blessed hour for me when I lost faith in the future and began to interrogate the present. I think I see a prisoner in a cell. On a table a letter has been lying many days which he fancies for somebody else and not for him. It authorizes him to claim the right of egress and to go out of his jail and to go to a comfortable dwelling provided for him. But, he says, it is not for me; if it were for me, it would not leave me here. He is there because he has not the faith. Why should you make light of all that God has done to inspire you with faith? You do this when you fail to recognize what God offers you. The lying spirit of unbelief will say to you, this does not suit your case. Let not that spirit continue in his post of doorkeeper of your heart. How glad I should be to hear that you have decided to let God be true, though every man a liar. All happiness is in the recognition of Him Who sits upon the throne, whose nature and whose name is Love, Who gives Himself and is Himself Love Almighty to every atom, and is excluded only by man’s unbelieving heart. God has never done anything for me, or will do, that He is not offering to every creature, for He offers Himself and He is Love. You have only to let God be true, let Him be Himself, and you will find yourself in Paradise. The New Jerusalem comes down from God out of heaven when men discover this. But it is hid from them by the great concern that they have for self. Do not allow your heart to cheat you out of the blessings contained in this truth. . . ."

Again he writes, "I deeply feel that what you want is not that God should take up some new attitude towards you or do anything, or be anything but what He is, but that you should recognize Him as revealed at the Cross. What makes heaven to be heaven is that the truth which you fail to see is there seen by all." Bowen counseled thus out of his own experience. "As you would wish your own word to be honoured," he wrote (August 11, 1885), "honour God’s. Salvation is in that very thing. I was just on the border of despair in 1845, till on the 4th of December I saw that all I had been seeking in myself, I had in Christ. I had been tormenting myself by looking hourly to my own heart for the dawn of a brighter day, looking (if you please) for Christ in my heart rather than for Christ in the Word, and I found life, joy and peace when I let go my own heart and looked for Christ alone, as the Israelites looked to the brazen serpent." The path he urged upon others he had trod himself and he knew whither it led.

One supreme test George Bowen met. Little children loved him and felt that in him they had a friend without dissimulation or suggestion of distrust. Can a man ask more than that? When he died, says Prescott of the great William, in "The Rise of the Dutch Republic," a whole great nation mourned for him and the little children cried upon the streets.

I suppose to some of you this sketch has introduced an altogether new character. Men fall fast out of memory and George Bowen would not have lifted a finger to prolong his fame. But he is a man whom we cannot afford to forget. In reviving his story, I am conscious of the danger to which Dr. Mackichan referred just after his death: "To those of us who were intimately associated with the departed missionary leader, the sense of loss has day by day grown deeper. Christian work with which he was associated and Christian assemblies which he was wont to frequent, have seemed almost less Christian by reason of the absence of one who gave the high tone of his own spirit to everything with which he was identified. As we contemplate the end of his conversation we are not strangers to the danger of resting satisfied with a vicarious devotion. It was inspiring and strengthening to know that one lived and worked so nobly in the midst of us. But to admire and describe this life is the least part of that which it requires of us. In every department of Christian service the same spirit of reality and consecration is needed, and if this brief record of his life shall in any measure help to keep alive the memory of this man of God, and lead those who have a part in the same work to become partakers of his higher faith, it will be contributing to the accomplishment of no unimportant part of the work for which George Bowen lived and laboured and died."

It is easy for us to be content with looking at such sacrifice and total devotion in a missionary of a past generation. But there was no standard of duty or ideal of character before George Bowen that is not before us. If he utterly denied himself and wholly sought to live unto God in all things, it was in response to no call that does not also sound in our hearts and summon us to the same task of the world’s evangelisation and to the same life of Christlike candour and reality. In the quiet of this hour can we not hear this Voice saying to us, "And you, why do you too not follow Me as he followed whom men called ’The Lamb of India’?"

SOURCE: The Cole Lectures for 1911 delivered before Vanderbilt University "Some Great Leaders In The World Movement" (pp 153-194) by, Robt. E. Speer Copyright, 1911, by FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY