Forty Years in South China The Life of Rev. John Van Nest Talmage, D.D.

Excerpt

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.