Page:The Moslem World - Volume 02.djvu/168

 of work were imperfect, their faith in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, was strong and active. That the Churches of the Middle Ages were not entirely uprooted during all the upheavals and catastrophes of those dark days, that they were able not only to keep their own faith but also to spread faith in regions beyond the civilized world of that day, they certainly owed to their firm belief in Christ as the Son of God, which virtually is belief in the triune God.

Allow me to draw your attention also to the detrimental influence Unitarianism has exercised on missions during the reign of the Rationalism of the eighteenth century. Pietists and Moravian brethren had begun a fine missionary work, the former in India and the latter in West India and other fields. The University of Halle, where Franke taught in the spirit of Spencer, was the centre of pietistical missionary enterprises. The beginnings were grand, and promised much for the future. Ziegenbalg, Schwartz and Pluetschau were very much blessed in their work. It seemed as if India was to turn to Christ and to surrender to Him. But, alas! this was not to be. Pietism, with all its extravagances, yielded to the illumination; and Halle, strange to say, became the citadel of a dry and cold Rationalism, which discarded the revelation of God in the Holy Scriptures and with it the doctrine of the Trinity, in order to establish a kind of deistical natural religion. The missionaries, who were then in the field, joined the ranks of the Rationalists, and they soon found out that there was no work for them to do. They left the field, and the promising beginning ended in complete failure. The modern Unitarianism of Rationalism acted as a night frost does upon vegetation. At the same time the missionary efforts of the Moravian brethren continued to grow and flourish. Their theological conception of the doctrine of the Trinity was possibly crude, still their faith in the Godhead of the Son of God was strong and full of devotion. And this soteriological aspect of the doctrine certainly is the core of the matter.

There is really no place for Unitarians in the mission field. Ethics divorced from faith in the triune God is no