‘A new year message to the Society of Friends’: Henry T Hodgkin, from 28th 12th Mo. (December), 1917

‘No easy way opens up to us, and yet it is the way of joy.’

We are set in the midst of a world of men and women whose chief and deepest need is a living relationship with their Heavenly Father. That fellowship once established, the way is open for fellowship between man and man, and between nation and nation. Out of such an experience we may be brought into the one kind of human society which will endure, because it is founded according to the mind of Christ, and in harmony with His supreme purpose. Reconstruction, international settlement, inter-racial reconciliation – all these are vain terms, holding up mere dreams of future well-being, unless men’s hearts are possessed by the love of God, self-seeking and all private­ mindedness being driven forth by the passion of an all-absorbing love to God and to our fellow-men. No negation of evil will save us today. Only the cleansing streams of divine love and power can carry us forward to realise a new and better world. Love must be in us no passing emotion, but a dynamic and creative force. This it may become, not by the will of man, but as we are born of the Spirit.

Between the world so sorely in need of this new creation and the Source of all creative power, stand the men and women in whom this power shall be incarnated. The living God clothed in human flesh and using human speech made known his will and His way to men in Galilee nineteen hundred years ago. In Jesus Christ, our Lord and Saviour, He brought into a hopeless world a new and living hope. The Kingdom of God became a realisable possibility. It was indeed at hand.

Today, the same loving Father seeks men and women to carry on the work. Christ Jesus moves amongst us by His ever-present Spirit, seeking to come into the hearts of all men, and bring them into fellowship with their Father. He calls us, as individuals and as a Society, to follow Him, to be His partners in the world-embracing enterprise.

Home and Foreign Missions are mere terms. There is but one enterprise in the world worthy of the whole manhood and woman­hood of the children of God. To make Christ known, to lift Him up before men, to lead men’s hearts into that living fellowship with their Father which is possible through Christ, to establish His rule on earth – this is the one task in which, whether at home or abroad, whether workers for peace or missions or social reform, we are all called to co-operate. Now is the time to bend every energy in the great endeavour.

How, then, shall we enter into this service? There is but one way. We are called by all the voices of bitterness and despair and sorrow that fill the air in these sad days, we are called by all the cries of aspiration and longing for a better world that may still be heard even amidst the din of battle, we are called by the voiceless yearning of those who sit in darkness to enter upon that one way. We are called into the faithful and wholehearted following of Jesus Christ. He leads the great adventure. He asks not for wisdom or riches or influence, but simply for the whole, full heart of utter trust and absolute loyalty. Abandoning ourselves to Him, led by His Spirit, constrained by His love, we shall find our place in the buildings of the City of God, of which He is the architect and in which He is both the foundation and the cornerstone.

For each one who thus follows there is work of absorbing interest, of untold significance, because the one otherwise aimless and futile life is fitted into a glorious design, and takes on a meaning and value not propor­tioned to its own small capabilities, but de­termined by the grandeur of the whole divine plan. The Society of Friends is being called, nay even impelled, not by some outward stimulus, but by a deep inward impulse, into the world’s service. Its message is not with words of men’s wisdom: it is simply to set forth Christ and Him crucified.

Let every one of us see to it that we are linked in this common effort. Only in Christ can we be so linked. The Apostle Paul counted all things as loss that he might be found in Christ. The Master, stripped even of His clothes, turning His back on all worldly power and pleasure, trod for us alone the path of uttermost sacrifice. If we are to know the saving power of His cross, we must be sharers of it. ‘If any man would follow Me, let him take up his cross daily.’

No easy way opens up to us, and yet it is the way of joy. No light task is before us, yet the burden will be borne in fellowship with the best of friends. To win the world for Christ seems wildly impossible, yet with God all things are possible. We need, as a Society, to stand together, for apart, and criticising one another, we must surely fail. We need to stand together in fearless loyalty to our great Head, filled with the missionary spirit, possessed by the passion of divine love, proclaiming by life and lip the Everlasting Gospel of redeeming grace.

Henry Theodore Hodgkin (1877-1933) was a medical doctor and missionary who: co-founded the West China Union University in Chengdu; co-founded and led the first Christian pacifist movement (the International Fellowship of Reconciliation); and founded the Pendle Hill Quaker Meeting and training center, in Wallingford, Pennsylvania. A note to this article says it was inspired by a recent conference of the Friends Foreign Mission Association. Hodgkin’s views changed considerably over the course of his life, and he came to appreciate the validity of other witnesses to God than the Christian one: ‘I believe that God’s best for another may be so different from my experience and way of living as to be actually impossible for me. I recognize a change to have taken place in myself, from a certain assumption that mine was really the better way, to a very complete recognition that there is no one better way and that God needs all kinds of people and ways of living through which to manifest Himself in the World. This has seemed to carry with it two conclusions which greatly affect conduct. One is that I really find myself wanting to learn from people whom I previously would have regarded as fit objects for my “missionary zeal”. To discover another way in which God is operating – along lines it may be distasteful or dangerous to me – is a large part of the fun of living. The second direction in which conduct is influenced is the deliberate attempt to share the life and interests of others who are not in my circle… [for] in such sharing I can most deeply understand the other’s life and through that reach, maybe, fresh truths about God.’

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