Project Gutenberg's Forty Years in South China, by Rev. John Gerardus Fagg

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

Author: Rev. John Gerardus Fagg

Release Date: March 28, 2004 [EBook #11754]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FORTY YEARS IN SOUTH CHINA ***

Produced by David Newman in honor of Barbara Talmage Griffin (1918-2004),
great-granddaughter of the subject of this biography.

FORTY YEARS IN SOUTH CHINA

The Life of Rev. John Van Nest Talmage, D.D.

by

Rev. John Gerardus Fagg
Missionary of the American Reformed (Dutch) Church, at Amoy, China

1894

INTRODUCTION.

BY REV. T. DE WITT TALMAGE, D.D.

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 w