Douglas M Thornton – Study in Missionary Ideals and Methods

Douglas M. Thornton [1873-1907] was an Anglican missionary to Egypt, where he worked among the muslim population. He died after only nine years there, of typhoid fever, but the missionary principles he demonstrated were carried on by W.H.T. Gairdner and others – hence this book’s title.

My thanks to the Cambridge Centre for Christianity Worldwide for providing a copy of this book for digitisation. This title is in the public domain.

William Henry Temple Gairdner [1873-1929], D.M. Thornton. A Study in Missionary Ideals and Methods. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1909. Hbk. pp.283. Click to download complete book in PDF]

Table of Contents

• Preface
  

1. Childhood and Schooldays
2. The Christian Student Movement – On the Staff
3. On the Threshold
4. The Field and the Man
5. The First Six Months
6. The First Six Months
7. A Glimpse Within
8. Apprenticeship
9. Experimental
10. The Literature Idea
11. “Bait Arabi Pasha”
12. “Orient and Occident”
13. The Last Furlough
14. The Last Year
15. The Last Dawn – and the First

Preface

“Thornton was the first man I ever met who devoted his intellectual powers to thinking out the wider problems of the evangelisation of the world and the spread of Christian institutions in mission lands. Although since then I have met others who were occupied with the same questions, I have never known any one who approached them with more whole-hearted devotion, a keener zeal for knowledge, a closer mastery of detail, or a more far-sighted and elevating faith.”

-[Extract from a Memorial Sketch, by a Cambridge friend.]

The above words, by a friend of D. M. Thornton’s, and a man already highly distinguished in the field of scientific research, express very justly the reasons which dictated the writing of this Memoir. It is not that Thornton was the writer’s dear friend and intimate colleague and leader in work -such a reason would not have been sufficient, had not he been, as he was, representative. [Continue reading]