Arthur Margoschis:
Would He Recognise
the Gospel Today?

What is this page about?

Nazareth is a small town in the Thoothukudi district of Tamil Nadu, in south India. Christians gave it this name in the early 1800s. It has a large church, a hospital, several schools and a college. Most of them are there because of one Englishman.

His name was Arthur Margoschis. He came in December 1876. He died there in April 1908. He never married. He had a sickness that made breathing hard. He was fifty-five years old.

In the same district today, many people preach a different Christianity.

• It promises money.
• It shows healing on a stage.
• It says that baptism and the Lord’s Supper are only signs.
• In some churches, it baptizes people a second time. The families of these people were first baptized by the old mission, four or five generations ago.

Every person is free to change what he believes. But some people say something more. They say, “We are bringing back what the missionaries really had.” That is a claim about the past. We can check claims about the past.

What he built

He came at the age of twenty-four. He had studied medicine but had not finished. He had no money of his own. Here is what he built.

Every one of these things continued after he died. Several are open today.

A difficult quotation, shown first

Some people may want to use Margoschis against preachers who ask for money. There is a problem with that. In 1893 he wrote:

Natives of India do not believe in a religion which costs them nothing… When Hindoos become Christians there is no reason why they should think it the duty of the Mission to support them.

Arthur Margoschis, 1893

In simple words: The people of India do not believe in a religion that costs them nothing. When Hindus become Christians, the mission does not have a duty to pay for their needs.

So this missionary said that Christians should pay for their own church. Many missionaries said this at that time. They did not want the churches to depend on money from London for ever.

This page must be honest about that sentence. But look at what it says and what it does not say.

• “Pay for your own church” is one sentence.
• “Give to me, and God will make you rich” is a very different sentence.

The second does not follow from the first. At Nazareth the money went into a fund for families of the dead, a fund for widows, schools, and a hospital that charged one penny. And the man died without a wife and without wealth, in the town where he worked.

He believed that God heals. He also built a hospital.

Do not think that the difference is about whether God heals. Margoschis prayed for sick people all the time. His church’s prayer book has a whole service for the sick.

The difference is what a person does next. He had some medical training. Nobody else for many miles had any. So he opened a small place to give medicine, and he worked in it for the rest of his life. For him, prayer and medicine did not fight each other. The hospital was part of his Christian work.

There is a second difference. In the old way, healing is kindness to a sick person. In the new way, healing has another job too. It proves the power of the preacher.

These two pull in opposite directions. Kindness is best done quietly and cheaply, for people who cannot pay back. A proof needs a crowd.

The New Testament tells a sick Christian what to do:

Is any among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the assembly, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord

James 5:14 · World English Bible

In simple words: Is one of you sick? He should call the leaders of the church. They should pray over him and put oil on him in the name of the Lord.

Look at the details. The sick person does not travel. There is no crowd. Several leaders come, not one man with a special gift. Nobody collects money. Every detail points away from a stage.

Asking God, and telling God

These two sentences are very different.

Look at the great moments of power in the Bible. See how the people speak.

• The prophet Elijah stood before thousands of people. Fire was about to fall from heaven. He did not give an order. He asked: “Hear me, Yahweh, hear me” (1 Kings 18:37).
• Three men stood before a burning fire. They said that God was able to save them. Then they said: “But if not” (Daniel 3:18).
• Jesus prayed in the garden before his death: “not what I desire, but what you desire” (Matthew 26:39).

It is true that Christians sometimes give an order. Peter told a man who could not walk to get up and walk. But first Peter said: “I have no silver or gold” (Acts 3:6). And afterwards he said again and again that the power was not his.

What we know for sure

When people say what a man who died in 1908 would think about today, they are mostly guessing. But this part is not guessing. He left documents.

He was a priest of the Church of England. To become a priest, he had to agree to that church’s statement of belief. It is called the Articles of Religion. To baptize, he read the service from the Book of Common Prayer. Both are short, and anyone can read them.

Baptism is not only a sign of profession, and mark of difference… but it is also a sign of Regeneration or new Birth, whereby, as by an instrument, they that receive Baptism rightly are grafted into the Church.

Articles of Religion, Article 27, on Baptism

In simple words: Baptism is not only a sign that a person says he is a Christian. It is also a sign of the new birth. God uses it like a tool. Through it, people who receive baptism rightly are joined to the church.

Read the first words again: “not only a sign”. The Article knows the idea that baptism is only a person’s public statement. It says this idea is not enough. Baptism is a tool. God works through it.

And these are the words he said aloud over the babies of that town, right after the water:

Seeing now, dearly beloved brethren, that this Child is regenerate and grafted into the body of Christ’s Church…

Book of Common Prayer, 1662, the baptism of babies

In simple words: Dear brothers and sisters, this child is now born again and joined to the body of Christ’s church.

He does not say that the water is a picture of something that happened before. He does not say that it will count later if the child truly believes. He says “is”. He is speaking about something God has done.

One baptism

Every Sunday, at the Lord’s Supper, Margoschis said the Nicene Creed. It has this line:

I acknowledge one Baptism for the remission of sins.

The Nicene Creed, year 381

In simple words: I believe in one baptism. In it, God forgives sins.

This is not only an Anglican idea. Catholics, Orthodox, Lutherans, Anglicans and most Reformed churches say this creed. For 1,600 years it has meant this: a true baptism is not repeated. It is like a birth.

The great teacher Augustine explained it about the year 400. Baptism belongs to Christ. It does not belong to the minister. It does not depend on the heart of the person who receives it.

Martin Luther changed many things in the church. He would not change this. He wrote in 1528:

Whoever allows himself to be baptized on the strength of his faith, is not only uncertain, but also an idolator who denies Christ. For he trusts in and builds on something of his own.

Martin Luther, 1528

In simple words: A person may be baptized because he trusts that his own faith is strong enough. That person can never be sure. He also puts something of his own in the place of Christ, because he trusts in himself.

Think about it. Does my baptism depend on how good my faith was on that day? Then my hope stands on the one thing I can never trust.

The other side, said fairly

Some Christians baptize only people who believe. They are not careless about the creed. Their idea is this. The baptism of a baby was never a baptism. So when that person is baptized as an adult, it is the first baptism, not the second. They have Bible passages for this. In the book of Acts, people believe first and are baptized after.

This page does not say that they are wrong about the New Testament. It says something smaller: they cannot say that Margoschis believed this. He said the creed and read the baptism service hundreds of times.

What a second baptism says about a family

Think of a person in that district. The family has been Christian for five generations because of the mission. Now someone tells this person, “You were never really baptized.” The person is baptized again. In the teaching of the old mission, this says four things at once.

1. The first baptism was not a baptism. It was nothing.
2. The person’s confirmation was empty, because there was nothing to confirm.
3. Sixty years of receiving the Lord’s Supper stood on a mistake.
4. The old church did not really do its work. So the new church becomes the place where this family’s Christian faith truly began.

Nobody has to be dishonest for this to be the meaning. Most people who baptize someone a second time believe they are being kind. But the meaning goes in one direction. The Christian faith that a whole community received is called not good enough. And the new ministry has the power to say so and to fix it.

Where is your fruit?

A ministry works in a place for twenty years. What does it produce? Some things a stranger can check without believing anyone’s word. Other things a stranger cannot check.

A stranger can check these things:

• A hospital that treats people who never came to the church. Nazareth has had one since 1892.
• Schools. Nazareth had several, and the first girls in the region to pass the university entrance examination.
• A fund that pays money out to poor families. Nazareth had one from 1884.
• Works that still continue a hundred years after the founder died. This is the hardest test. At Nazareth, most of them continue.

A stranger cannot check these things:

• Changed hearts and quiet prayer. These may be the most important things of all.
• The number of people who came forward at a meeting. This is counted on the night and gone in the morning.
• Healings that were announced. An announcement is not a result. A result would be the same people, with names, five years later, with records.

The test shows what can be seen. It does not show what is most valuable. But Margoschis said that the Gospel produces things like schools and care for the sick. Then anyone could look and see if they were there. They were.

Check it yourself

First, one thing this page is not. It is history. It is not advice, and it does not know your situation. It also does not decide whether the baptism of babies is right. You can agree with every word here and still be a Baptist. What Margoschis believed is one question. Whether he was right is another.

A decision about your own baptism is very important for a family and a community. Make it slowly, with people who know you. If you can, talk with a person from each side.

1. Read Articles 25 to 28 of the Articles of Religion. It takes ten minutes.
2. Read the 1662 service for the baptism of babies to the end. This is the service he used.
3. Read the Lausanne statement on the “prosperity gospel” from 2008 and 2009. Evangelical Christians wrote it, many of them from Africa and Asia.
4. To hear the other side well, read chapters 28 and 29 of the Baptist Confession of 1689.