Here is the latest inspirational and informative article on influential Scots in Church History and Missions by Paul James-Griffiths of Christian Heritage Edinburgh.

Paul writes, “As we continue with the series about missionaries sent out from Scotland in the 19th century, we are focusing on China. Today’s article is about William Chalmers Burns, whom I think is one of Scotland’s greatest missionaries. An extraordinary man serving an extraordinary God.”

Mrs Burns was flustered and started to become anxious. She had come to Glasgow from her home town of Kilsyth, and had just been shopping when she realised her seventeen-year-old son William had disappeared. Retracing her steps she found him in an alleyway with tears pouring down his face, as if in pain. Shocked, she called out “Willie my boy, what ails you? Are you ill?” With deep anguish he sobbed, “Oh, mother, mother – the thud of these Christless feet on the way to hell breaks my heart.” Such was the passion of William Chalmers Burns (1815-1868).

William Chalmers Burns had grown up as a son of a Presbyterian minister in Kilsyth, having been born in Dun in 1815. The family had high hopes for him to be a church minister like his father, but as a teenager his heart was drawn to the high-paying career of a lawyer. He went to Edinburgh to be an apprentice to his uncle Alexander, but at the age of sixteen he suddenly and unexpectedly returned home. Looking around his mother saw him standing there in the manse.

“Oh! Willie, where have you come from?” she asked, bemused.

“From Edinburgh,” he replied gravely.

“How did you come?” she said.

“I walked,” he answered. There was a long silence as he stood there warming his back by the fire. Edinburgh was a thirty-six-mile journey. Then came his question:

“What would you think, mamma, if I should be a minister after all?”

His brother overheard the conversation and finding a vacant room, fell to his knees, weeping for joy.

Burns knew from that first encounter with Christ at the University of Edinburgh, that God had called him to be “in the ministry of that glorious Gospel”. He studied for the ministry at the university in Aberdeen, and then at Glasgow University. Whilst at Glasgow University he joined the Students’ Missionary Society, which had developed out of the St Andrews University Missionary Association of 1824, pioneered by John Urquhart and Alexander Duff, the missionary to India. Burns and the students in Glasgow studied the missionary lives of David Brainerd, Henry Martyn, Joshua Marshman, Alexander Duff and others, until, as he says “our hearts burned within us, and we longed to go forth and mix ourselves with life, in the great battle that was going on in the church and in the world around.”It was here that Burns heard Dr Kalley speak about China, before he ended up in Madeira; the Chinese spark was struck in Burns’ heart, which would later become a passionate and unquenchable fire.

After Burns was licensed as a preacher in 1839, he was appointed as an interim pastor at St Peter’s in Dundee, whilst his friend Robert Murray M’Cheyne was away on his tour of the Jewish people. Burns, being a passionate intercessor, pleaded for God’s power to break through, and revival came, which spread through parts of Scotland, drawing thousands to Christ. Of the ministry there, his brother Islay, who was later the Professor of Theology at the Free Church College in Glasgow, wrote: “His speech and his preaching were not with the excellency of speech and man’s wisdom, but in a demonstration of the Spirit and of power… he was almost without parallel since the days of Wesley and Whitefield.”

By 1846 Burns was sensing a strong call from God to go as a missionary to China. Firstly, he arrived in Hong Kong where he studied the language and culture of the Chinese, as well as the beliefs of the Confucianists who were “the atheists and philosophical utilitarians of China”, the Taoists, who “peopled the earth and air with all sorts of spirits and demons”, and the Buddhists for whom “the object of their ambition is to lose all personal identity, and be absorbed in Buddha.”

When Burns arrived in China there were already fifty Protestant missionaries in this vast nation. Amoy became his base for a while where he saw some of the locals converted to Christ. One of these was Tan See Boo, who went to Singapore and planted several churches there, after changing his idol carving business into a jewellery business.

After mastering the language and translating John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress into Chinese, he left the missionary base in Amoy, determined to press on and reach as many people as he could. Two converted Chinese men accompanied him: one being a former fortune-teller, and the other a former soldier. They settled at a market town called Pechuia, where they found the people were especially hungry to know about God. Burns described the situation in 1852-3:

“I have not witnessed the same state of things in China before… “So mightily grew the Word of God and prevailed.” There was everywhere the stir and glad excitement of a busy harvest-field. There were all the signs of the coming of the kingdom of God after the true model of apostolic times… What I see here makes me call to mind former days of the Lord’s power in my native land.”

Burns had a restless spiritual energy and kept moving on, longing to sow the message of Christ as far and wide as he could, leaving Gospels in Chinese everywhere he went. It was whilst being on one of these mission trips to Shanghai that he met Hudson Taylor in 1855. Immediately a deep friendship struck up between the two like-minded missionaries. Burns referred to his companion as “an excellent young English missionary, Mr Taylor, of the Chinese Evangelization Society.”

Hudson Taylor’s enthusiasm for wearing national Chinese clothing caught Burns’ attention; he had considered and rejected this idea before, but after this encounter he wore Chinese clothing as an outward sign that he desired to see a Chinese church, not a Western church, established. However, his impact on Hudson Taylor was much more significant. Taylor, who had such a huge contribution to make in China later, would write in his book of the model of prayer and evangelism he copied from Burns and applied to his ministry:

“Never had I had such a spiritual father as Mr. Burns… Those happy months were an unspeakable joy and privilege to me. His love for the Word was delightful, and his holy, reverential life and constant communing with God made fellowship with him satisfying to the deep cravings of my heart. His accounts of revival work and of persecutions in Canada, and Dublin, and in Southern China were most instructive, as well as interesting; for with true spiritual insight he often pointed out God’s purposes in trial in a way that made all life assume quite a new aspect and value. His views especially about evangelism as the great work of the church, and the order of lay evangelists as a lost order that Scripture required to be restored, were seed-thoughts which were to prove fruitful in the subsequent organization of the China Inland Mission.”

In Swatow, Burns found a deep darkness “where pollution and debauchery seem to stalk abroad without shame.” Here he found clan feuds and prisoners who had been cut to pieces, and their hearts boiled and eaten by their enemies. He soon discovered that the root cause of much of the horrific decadence and anarchy came from the British opium trade which had wrecked the lives of so many. It was this evil trade which would lead to the Opium Wars later. It was in Swatow too that Burns saw the strongest influence of witchcraft, in which young boys would be possessed by spirits, or pretend to be, and were “looked upon as the oracular voice of the idol whom the people worship.”When disease struck the people, they would rely upon shamanistic cures, as directed by the spirits. To counteract this Burns set up a medical work to treat the sick and preached the gospel to thousands.

In 1858, we find him back at Amoy where he set up a small college to train up local Chinese, which his brother Islay referred to as “A numerous “school of the prophets”… for the training of native evangelists and teachers [which] flourished under the missionary’s own care.”

When Burns became ill, he was still focused on breaking through the unreached soil of Chinese hearts. Sensing God’s call to Niu-Chuang, a port in the district of Manchuria, he poured out his soul for the twenty-five million people there, pleading from his death-bed for God to send others to reach them. When he died in 1868, aged fifty-three, his trunk was sent home to Scotland with nothing of value, other than his books and some of his Chinese manuscripts. He had lived and died not seeking wealth, but the riches of God for the people of China.

Once, when he was alive, a Westerner asked a missionary whether he had ever heard of William Chalmers Burns. “Know him, sir?” exclaimed the missionary. “All China knows him; he is the holiest man alive.”

The Revd James Johnston, a former colleague of Burns, who later became the Secretary of the Scottish Committee, expressed what many felt about Burns’ contribution to China:

“Reckoned by the numbers of conversions under his direct preaching, the results are small; measured by the effect of his personal influence, the results are great… His work was to break up the ground and sow the seed, not to gather a harvest. No man in this age, so far as we know, has so entirely devoted himself to this self-denying work. Again and again, has our departed brother laboured for years in some dark and unpromising field, and just when the first streaks of dawn appeared on the horizon, he would leave another to enjoy the glorious sun-rise, while he buried himself in some other region sunk in heathen darkness. Again and again, we have seen him thus in prayers and tears sowing the precious seed, and as soon as he saw the green shoots appear above the dark soil, he would leave to others the arduous yet happy task of reaping the harvest, and begin again his appointed work in breaking up the fallow ground.”

In a Scottish sky, filled with missionary stars who shone for Jesus, William Chalmers Burns was pre-eminent among them.

“Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations” (Matthew 28:19, NKJV).