Modern Baptist Heroes and Martyrs

p. 11Humanity has always been powerfully moved by two forces, the gregarious or crowd-forming and the individualistic. The first force for centuries proved the more powerful, and the young and weak elements of humanity became crowded together. Such crowds afforded opportunities for the self-aggrandizement of the strong and base and cunning. In such relations the story of man's inhumanity to man is full of tears and blood. Slavery of body and mind and soul prevailed. Those members of the crowd who possessed organizing skill, political and financial cunning, herded the people and imprisoned, fleeced and slaughtered them as their greed and vanity dictated. Truly those were long and dark ages.

god's favorites.

But the other force in humanity had to be reckoned with, the individualistic. People after all were found not to be sheep and God was over and in them. There are no more interesting or instructive parts of history than those where individuals, open-faced and with heads uplifted, began to question and to defy the arbitrary p. 12sway of the crowd-forming force. That questioning and that defying were the first green leaves of the coming glorious harvests.

History is the record of the struggle, bitter and unceasing, between these two forces, the crowd-forming and the individualistic. These make the anvil and the hammer with which God undertook to forge out members for a new order of society, the Kingdom of Heaven upon earth. God seems to value above all tears and chains and groans and martyrs' graves, the outcome of struggle. He avows in inspiration that His favorites, those who shall sit with Him upon His throne judging the nations, are the overcomers.

p. 12The Baptists have always headed the individualistic forces. That .was the part assigned to them in the human drama, and that is their glory and crown. Naturally, then, their history is a history of conflicts, of chains and prisons. It is no string of accidents which has caused the Baptists to furnish so large a part of the world's heroes and martyrs.

Every war has its budget of cost, and the Baptists have always been at war. They have been in the very nature of their calling the religious warriors of the centuries, and they possess the warrior's virtues and the warrior's faults, and they must naturally expect to leave their dead upon the world's battle fields. It is conceded p. 13by the historian Bancroft that freedom of conscience is their trophy. If all the corner stones laid in freedom's honor could have a composite expression in human form there would be a greater "Stone Face" than Nathaniel Hawthorne's and its very lineaments would be Baptistic.

p. 13Freedom for the individual and unconditioned loyalty to the living, present and reigning Christ are the two links which bind Baptists together, and which, it is apparent, will in no distant day bind together all who are called by His name.

These two principles are today commonplace principles with the people who read and think. The passionate love of Baptists for liberty has permeated the atmosphere of the world; for generations it has been built into the essential 'structure of humanity.

The claim accented in this volume is that in this great cause the Baptists are leading and have always led. This is the way of approach to Baptists and by Baptists for the coming answer to the Master's prayer for the oneness of His followers.

The story of one hero, the George Washington of Haitian Negroes, is told herein who was not a Baptist, but he was moved by the spirit which has always moved Baptists, and he became a name-kindled spirit, a spirit storm-swept for freedom, viz.^ Toussaint L'Ouverture. p. 14All such the Baptists are learning to claim as closest of kin.

p. 14Just at this time there breaks forth with the suddenness of a summer shower a varied, rich and wide-spread array of heroes and martyrs. The explanation is found in the almost sudden, prairie-fire-like spread of the democratic spirit over the continents.- Century-long tyrannical forces face extinction and their officials are fighting for their lives. There are heroes and martyrs in other lands, some of whose stones appear in this volume but in Russia and the other Slav states are found numbers of men and women and children whose lives are blackened by prisons, by scourgings, and by wounds of clanking and cruel chains, and the lives of others are being murderously blotted out. This collection of hero and martyr stones is published as a protest against 'all these wrongs and a® a contribution to the forces fighting for freedom and faith.

Of course only a small part of the stones of those who have suffered and who are suffering for their faith appear in this volume, but here will be found representatives from many countries upon both continents — Russians, Letts, Bohemian's, Moravians, Bulgarians, Servians, Hungarians, Brazilians, Chinese, Mexicans, Argentines, Negroes, Indians, Americans and others. It has been my endeavor to get the stones at first hand, either p. 15written by the sufferers themselves or by those in close touch with them. In other cases the facts have been collected and verified, and writers secured with special equipment for each case, who have sought as far as possible to use the very words of the subjects of the stones. The many excellent portraits given add much to the value of the volume.

p. 15First of all my debt is to the Baptist World Alliance and especially to the recent session in Philadelphia, June, 1911. Out of my relations to this body have come the information and inspiration which have made this volume possible. I am deeply indebted to Rev. Charles T. Byford, the Commissioner of the Baptist World Alliance to the Continent of Europe, a brother to whom history will give great honor for his faithful and wise service in his large and trying field. His picture appears in the frontispiece group, the first on the left of the center line. (A word of explanation regarding the appearance in this group of my picture. I was accidentally passing the hotel of the Russian messengers when they were being posed on the pavement by a photographer, and in a chorus they began to cry out merrily, "Russian," "Russian," and they made a place and would have it as it is — an incident of abiding pleasure to the adopted "Russian".) Indebtedness is acknowledged to the Baptist Times, London, which published a number of rep. 16ports of Commissioner Byford and others. And to Rev. A. J. Vining, the Baptist World Alliance representative in America, who first put me in correspondence with a number of these heroes, who had in this way, previous to the meeting of the Alliance, become personal friends, brothers honored and well beloved.