Henry Grattan Guinness’s 21 Years of Missionary Endeavour

Henry Grattan Guinness [1835-1910] was one of the most influential figures in 19th Century missions. According to the Evangelical Dictionary of World Missions:

After visiting France in 1865, Guinness founded the McAll Mission. In 1873, he opened the East London Institute for Home and Foreign Missions at Harley House. Guinness’s influence also led to the founding of the North Africa Mission in 1881 and the Livingstone Inland Mission in 1887, which began in the Congo and expanded to South America and North India, eventually becoming part of the Regions Beyond Missionary Union in 1889. [p.420]

In this book Henry Guinness tells the story of his own 21 years of tireless missionary service. My thanks to Redcliffe College for providing copies of these books for digitisation. This title is in the public domain.

Henry Grattan Guinness [1835-1910], “Not Unto Us:” A Record of Twenty-One Years of Missionary Service. London: Regions Beyond Missionary Union, 1908. Hbk. pp.194. [Click to download complete book in PDF]

Introduction

Since this book may fall into the hands of many who are unacquainted with the origin of the work to which we have devoted the last twenty-one years, I venture to give in this introductory chapter a few historical paragraphs.

Its beloved founder, whose excellent portrait, taken at Brisbane, is reproduced as our frontispiece, looks back not merely on twenty-one years of contact with student life, but on twice that period. Exactly twenty-one years before 1887, when in the midst of his evangelistic labours, he established a class for young men in the city of Dublin with the object of studying with them, Paley’s Horae Paulinae. As it turned out, this class foreshadowed the Institute yet to be, and among the Irish students of those days were two young men destined to occupy important spheres of service-Thomas -J. Barnardo and John McCarthy, subsequently of the China Inland Mission. [Continue reading]

Those interested in reading more about the Guinness family can find a bibliography of Henry Grattan Guinness here, the works of his daughter Lucy Evangeline here and his Son-on-Law, Hermann Karl Wilhelm Kumm here.