Forty Years in South China

Forty Years in South China

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Title: Forty Years in South China The Life of Rev. John Van Nest
Talmage, D.D.
Author: Rev. John Gerardus Fagg
Release Date: March 28, 2004 [EBook #11754]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FORTY
YEARS IN SOUTH CHINA ***

Produced by David Newman in honor of Barbara Talmage Griffin
(1918-2004), great-granddaughter of the subject of this biography.

FORTY YEARS IN SOUTH CHINA
The Life of Rev. John Van Nest Talmage, D.D.
by
Rev. John Gerardus Fagg Missionary of the American Reformed
(Dutch) Church, at Amoy, China
1894

INTRODUCTION.
BY REV. T. DE WITT TALMAGE, D.D.

Too near was I to the subject of this biography to write an impartial
introduction. When John Van Nest Talmage went, my last brother went.
Stunned until I staggered through the corridors of the hotel in London,
England, when the news came that John was dead. If I should say all
that I felt I would declare that since Paul the great apostle to the
Gentiles, a more faithful or consecrated man has not lifted his voice in
the dark places of heathenism. I said it while he was alive, and might as
well say it now that he is dead. "He was the hero of our family." He did
not go to a far-off land to preach because people in America did not
want to hear him preach. At the time of his first going to China he had
a call to succeed Rev. Dr. Brodhead, of Brooklyn, the Chrysostom of
the American pulpit, a call with a large salary, and there would not
have been anything impossible to him in the matters of religious work
or Christian achievement had he tarried in his native land. But nothing
could detain him from the work to which God called him years before
he became a Christian. My reason for writing that anomalous statement
is that when a boy in Sabbath-school at Boundbrook, New Jersey, he
read a Library book, entitled "The Life of Henry Martyn, the
Missionary," and he said to our mother, "Mother! when I grow up I am
going to be a missionary!" The remark made no especial impression at
the time. Years passed on before his conversion. But when the grace of
God appeared to him, and he had begun his study for the ministry, he
said one day, "Mother! Do you remember that many years ago I said, 'I
am going to be a missionary'?" She replied, "Yes! I remember you said
so." "Well," said he, "I am going to keep my promise." And how well
he kept it millions of souls on earth and in heaven have long since
heard. But his chief work is yet to come. We get our chronology so
twisted that we come to believe that the white marble of the tomb is the
mile-stone at which a good man stops, when it is only a mile-stone on a
journey, the most of the miles of which are yet to be travelled.
The Dictionary which my brother prepared with more than two decades
of study, the religious literature he transferred from English into
Chinese, the hymns he wrote for others to sing, although himself could
not sing at all, (he and I monopolizing the musical incapacity of a
family in which all the rest could sing well), the missionary stations he
planted, the life he lived, will widen out, and deepen and intensify
through all time and all eternity.

I am glad that those competent to tell of his magnificent work have
undertaken it. You could get nothing about it from him at all. Ask him
a question trying to evoke what he had done for God and the church,
and his lips were as tightly shut as though they had never been opened.
He was animated enough when drawn out in discussion religious,
educational, or political, but he had great powers of silence. I once took
him to see General Grant, our reticent President. On that occasion they
both seemed to do their best in the art of quietude. The great military
President with his closed lips on one side of me, and my brother with
his closed lips on the other side of me, I felt there was more silence in
the room than I ever before knew to be crowded into the same space. It
was the same kind of reticence that always