David Sandeman, Missionary to China

As David Sandeman lay dying in China he was asked if he had any message to leave for his friends. This was his reply: “Tell my mother I thought of her, because she taught me the way to Jesus”. His mother’s name was Margaret Stewart Sandeman. She was born in Perth, Scotland, in February 1803 and died in the same town the day after her eightieth birthday. In one of David’s letters to her he says, “I often ask and marvel why the Lord should have given me a mother in Christ. While thousands and thousands of other men in the land have had godless mothers, and lived and died as they did – yet the Lord, of His unsearchable electing love, has ordained it otherwise with me”. His indebtedness to her was immense. And he felt it.

In a later article we will reflect on the lovely Christian life that Margaret Stewart Sandeman lived. In this we look at her son David. After his death in 1858 a biography of him was written by Andrew Bonar, author of the well-known Memoir of Robert Murray M’Cheyne. There are striking similarities between Bonar’s two subjects. Both were dear friends, both were Scottish ministers, both died young (M’Cheyne was twenty-nine, Sandeman thirty-two), both had an extraordinary passion for evangelism, and both were eminent for their godliness. Bonar’s Memoir of the Life and Brief Ministry of the Rev. David Sandeman, Missionary to China, to give it its full title, will be our principal source.

Conversion

David Sandeman was born in Perth on April 23rd 1826. The family home, Springland, was on the east side of the River Tay, less than a mile from Perth itself, and close to the ancient palace of Scone. It was in one of its rooms that, in 1844, at the age of eighteen, God’s salvation became his. The following is from a diary entry made in October 1851: “Here I am in the very room where my adorable Lord manifested the fullness of His love, mercy, beauty, and glory, to my soul, which he rescued out of the horrible pit and miry clay. O how sweet was His love to my soul. O how did he fill me all the day, in this sweet room and everywhere, with His overcoming love!”

The great change took place after returning to Perth from Glasgow where he had been training for a career in business. The time was drawing near for the Lord’s Supper to be dispensed in his home congregation, St Leonard’s Free Church. Was he in a state fit for that ordinance? “His honest conclusion”, writes Bonar, “was that he could not go to the Lord’s Table, for as yet he was not willing unreservedly to give himself to the Lord. ‘I was still rejecting’ (these are his words) ‘the waiting Saviour’s free calls to come. I was wilfully sinning against what I knew so well. I was an open rebel, so much the guiltier because brought up near Him, and so well acquainted with His law’”.

But the Lord’s time had come. “On the Sabbath evening”, continues Bonar, “with these feelings disquieting him, he…retired to his room. Then it was that the Lord found the sheep that was lost, and laid it upon his shoulder. While pondering alone on his spiritual condition, his heart

was drawn out ‘by the omnipotent hand of God’ to think simply of Christ, and the ‘willingness of Christ to receive all who have true wish to come to Him’…That was the evening (7th April) when he for the first time felt his soul cast anchor on the Rock of Ages”. The following Sunday he took his place for the first time at the Lord’s Table.

Zeal for souls

A book given to him by his mother at this time, Life of Harlan Page, had a profound impact on him. It prompted the following prayer: “Lord, who holdest the hearts of all men in Thy right hand, do Thou be pleased to make me, by Thy grace, a means of bringing poor, careless, and dying sinners to the Rock of Ages, and make me indefatigable in labouring for their conversion”.

How the Lord answered that prayer! Here is a diary entry from October 1848. After four years of study at Edinburgh University he is about to enter the Free Church’s New College to begin formal training for gospel ministry. “Living to the glory of God”, he confesses, “was in my unconverted days a mere name, but I should be denying the grace of the Lord, did I not say that, since my conversion, it has been one of the chief ruling desires of my heart. Love to souls has been many times as the breath of my spiritual life…” In illustration of this Bonar records the testimony of one of Sandeman’s friends, a Mr. Tait. The two of them had been on a walking holiday. Tait’s estimate is that in the course of that holiday Sandeman must have spoken to “not less than five hundred persons” in his zeal for Christ.

Hillhead to China

In early 1855 he went for several months to the then mining village of Hillhead (it is now part of the city of Glasgow). A probationer of the Free Church of Scotland, James Allan, had been labouring both there and in neighbouring Jordanhill since the previous year and there had been a significant movement of the Holy Spirit, especially after an outbreak of cholera. Bonar writes, “At this day [1861], I am personally acquainted with very many of those who were then brought to Christ, and can testify to the decided character of that awakening”. When James Allan had to leave for reasons of health David Sandeman was invited to take his place. “O for souls now!” he exclaimed. “What would I not give for those! and for faith, wisdom, and zeal to win them!” The few details preserved are enough to show that his desires were granted.

It was in China rather than Scotland that his all-too-brief ministry was to continue. For five or six years it had been the burden of his heart to serve as a missionary there and now the time was approaching. Back in 1847 the English Presbyterian Synod had sent out William Chalmers Burns as their first missionary to China. In April 1856 David Sandeman was ordained by the Synod to go out and join him. He sailed for China in the October of that year, arriving in Swatow in early December. He writes, “Went ashore and called on Dr. De la Porte. A door opened, and out came, in full Chinese dress and tail, W.C. Burns! Taking me into his room, according to his old wont, he said, ‘Let us engage in prayer’”.

Some nineteen months of gospel work followed and then, with startling suddenness, came the end. In July of 1858 Amoy, where he was stationed, was in the grip of a cholera epidemic.

“Hundreds said to be dying daily”, he wrote. Around midnight on the 30th he began to display the symptoms of cholera himself. After an illness of only twenty hours he was dead.

Some six weeks later, on the 8th of September 1858, his friend James Allan, whom he had succeeded in Hillhead, also died, “rejoicing in Christ and saying he was going home”. Comments Bonar, “Both seemed instruments fit for the Master’s use, and yet both were speedily called away. The resurrection-morning will cast light on these mysterious ways of our sovereign God”.

“Do not think his labours in China have been in vain”, writes one of his colleagues. “I believe he has been one of the greatest blessings to all the missionaries in Amoy. Through his unwearied prayerfulness, through his labours of love, through his great humility and fidelity, he contributed greatly to raise the tone of godliness in the entire missionary circle, and to effect a more distinct separation between the church and the world”.

The inscription on his tomb-stone may fitly close this short sketch: “Sacred to the Memory of the Rev. David Sandeman, Missionary to the Chinese from the Presbyterian Church in England. He died of cholera at Amoy, July 31, 1858, aged 32 years. From the time he gave himself to his Lord’s work, he entered upon a career of self-surrender which seemed to know no pause, and no abatement till he entered on his blessed rest”.