Missions and Modern History by Robert E. Speer

Robert E. Speer sets out his threefold purpose in writing this history of 19th Century missions:

• To correct distortions of the facts;
• To demonstrate the significance of missions in world events;
• To inform the reading public of important recent events.

My thanks to the Cambridge Centre for Christianity Worldwide for making these volumes available for digitisation. These books are in the public domain.

Robert E. Speer, Missions and Modern History. A Study of the Missionary Aspects of Some Great Movements of the Nineteenth Century, 2 Vols. New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1904. Hbk. pp. 714. [Click here to visit the download page]

Contents

• Preface

1. The Tai-Ping Rebellion
2. The Indian Mutiny
3. The Religion of the Bab
4. The Emancipation of Latin America
5. The Development of Africa
6. The Reform Movement in Hinduism

   Second Volume 

7. The Tong Hak Insurrection
8. The Transformation of Japan
9. The Armenian Massacres
10. The Going of the Spaniard
11. The Boxer Uprising
12. The Coming of the Slav
13. Missions and the World Movement

• Index

Chapter 13: Missions and the World-Movement

Of the twelve great movements which have been considered, all but two have been related to Asia. We are often told that Asia is the immovable continent, that she is what she has been and that she will remain what she is, that “some strange fiat of arrest, probably due to mental exhaustion has condemned the brown men and the yellow men to eternal reproduction of old ideas,” that there notion and institution have hardened into permanency and that the continent must be regarded as alien to great moral or intellectual movements and separate from the stirrings of life that work ceaseless change in the West. How is it possible to reconcile such a view with the facts which have passed before us? These Asiatic nations are alive. The stock is not exhausted. “The theory that China’s dependence is due to the fact that she has long since reached maturity and has outlived the natural term of national existence does not hold good….