APPENDIX. APPENDIX A. PRINCIPLES AND CONSTITUTION OF CARRUBBER'S CLOSE MISSION. 1. The fundamental principle of Carrubber's Close Mission is that it is not only the duty but the privilege, and ought to be the highest luxury, of every Christian to work for Jesus, and to spend and be spent in the extension of His kingdom. For that purpose it is not necessary to leave business, but to consider it only as the means that God has given us for our comfortable support and maintenance while we are so engaged. 2. If Christianity is to spread over the world, by far the greatest number of conversions must be the result of private dealing, and personal influence, every Christian leavening those around him. 3. In order to be successful it is not only necessary for the Christian to lead a high and holy life, it is also necessary that he should receive the baptism of the Holy Ghost, to endue him with power. Without this he will have little or no success. Minor Principles. 1. In Carrubber's Close Mission there were to be no salaries From the superintendent downwards no member should receive any remuneration for his work. All should be gratuitous. Whatever funds might be supplied by the public were to be applied to the payment of rent, taxes, coals, gas, and officer's salary. 2. More than thirty years' experience had convinced me that the cause of Christ had suffered grievously from too much government, and that perfect liberty is necessary in our labours for the advancement of the kingdom. I therefore resolved that in the proposed Mission every worker should be free to work in his own way. Christians are not so ready to go astray as those in power generally think. But even though they were, the cure would be worse than the disease, more especially in a mission in which the superintendent must always be inferior to many of the workers, and where all the workers are unpaid. In drawing up the constitution, therefore, the first thing that I did was to strip myself and all succeeding superintendents of any authority over the workers. If I had not done so, I should have been left alone in my glory. But I foresaw more danger in the workers themselves wishing to govern one another, and not allowing anything to be done that they did not all approve. At the very commencement, therefore, I inserted in the constitution that no one should be responsible for what another did; and that there should be no governing committee either in or over the Mission. For twenty-five years, while that article was adhered to, there never was a difficulty or a disagreement. When Mr. Moody came first to Edinburgh, and Mr. Jenkinson explained to him the peculiarities of the Mission, he was greatly taken with this article, and remarked that if Noah had built the ark under a committee, the flood would have been upon them before they had laid the keel. 3. In order to make this liberty safe, however, two limitations were inserted in the constitution, the first of which was, that every worker must be a member of some evangelical congregation in Edinburgh, whose pastor should be responsible for his Christian character, and Church standing. This relieved the superintendent of all responsibility on that point, for if the pastor of the worker was satisfied, that was enough. The second limitation was, that nothing was to be taught in the Mission contrary to the doctrines of the Shorter Catechism. It was not obligatory to teach all that was in the Shorter Catechism, such as infant baptism or the decrees; but it was to be understood that no controversy was to be allowed upon these subjects. It was the duty of the superintendents to see that these limitations were observed. 4. The study of the Bible and social prayer held a conspicuous place in the work of the mission. A class for evangelists was opened, taught by Professor Smeaton; and two nights in the week were set apart, one for a Bible reading; and the other for prayer. When the workers became too numerous to find employment in the chapel, I divided the more distinguished of the evangelists into sections, to carry on meetings of their own in different parts of the town, leaving each section to choose its own president, with whom I could correspond. (I anticipated the Salvation Army in calling them captains.) The only restriction was that each section must hold two meetings every week ; one for fellowship and the study of the Bible, and the other an evangelistic meeting. One of these branches was a female section, which continues to this day. It is still the practice of all the sections to have a meeting for prayer before going to work. The Young. The Sabbath school and the Bible classes formed the founda, tion upon which all our further operations rested, I believed that the Church had altogether underestimated the value and importance of the Sabbath school as the means of evangelising the country. Their great aim was to restore the lapsed masses to church-going habits, but, for such a purpose, the children were of no importance, because they could not take seats in the churches. If the object had been to evangelise the country without regard to attendance at church, common sense would have led them to begin with the young. It might almost be said that the adults are beyond our reach, because we can never hope to give them a thorough Bible education. We are just twenty years too late, for every one of them was once a little child which we might have taken upon our knee and instructed in the Bible. But we neglected them when they were young, and now they are beyond our reach, hurrying on to the judgment seat, where we must meet them as our There is not a single soul in that godless and hardened population that was not once a little child into whose young mind we might have instilled the lessons of a Saviour's love, storing his memory with the words of life, and teaching him the sweet songs of Zion, that would waken, in after life, associations of the holiest, and it may be, the tenderest recollections. accusers. At that time their hearts were open to kindness, and their habits yet unformed, like a twig that may be bent in any direction now, but which when grown will never bend. A trifling reward would have kindled their enthusiasm, and a rebuke or even a frown would have checked their sin. Having been trained thus in the way that they should go, now when they are old they would not have departed from it. All this might have been done when they were children; but as we allowed them to grow up as heathens (for heathenism is the natural state of man), we meet them as heathens now, ridicul ing our faith, despising our hypocrisy, and many of them hardened in drunkenness and infidelity against every attempt to reach their consciences and understanding. We preached or intended to preach to their parents then, because they were adults, but their parents were then what their children are now, hardened against all religious impressions, and because we expended our labours only on the adults, we are today reaping the natural and inevitable fruits of our sad mistake. We ought also to keep in mind that, in any circumstances, the adults will die out, and be succeeded by their children; if therefore we laid hold and kept hold of these young people, even though we should fail with the adults, the present generation would sooner or later disappear and give place to a new generation saturated with the Bible. If we could only stop the leak, we should save the ship, because death is constantly working at the pumps. In whatever light we look upon it, therefore, whether morally or socially, ecclesiastically or politically, the relief would be so unspeakable, the blessing so unbounded, and the gain so incalculable, that it would be more economical to pay the whole expense of the training of the children of one generation, and have done with it; so as to enable us and them to devote ourselves wholly to foreign and colonial missions, than to be continually and hopelessly struggling with a home heathenism, begotten of our own neglect and burdened with the taxation, the drunkenness, the pauperism, the democratic tyranny, and the social pollution of the present state of society. Childhood and youth are the Thermopyla of missions, because through that pass must flow forth the future population in a state in which we may mould them to our will. Whoever is able to take that pass and hold it for a single generation decides the destiny of his country. It ought, |