Many Christians in China know that Robert Morrison was the first Christian missionary to China, but few know the story of the kind of bible school that he attended or the legend of a man who trained him.
Robert Morrison was prepared by a Bible school that was not for the weak-hearted; it was called Gosport Academy. The academy was created and run by one man known as Dr. David Bogue.
The details of one of the most transformational Bible Schools in Christian history can be found in BTJ’s latest book “Bury Me In China.” You can find this on Amazon, or the ebook in our webstore. Below is an excerpt:
In its short history, Gosport Academy only trained 200 young men. Like Robert Morrison, they were all handpicked and trained by Dr. David Bogue himself. Each one would eventually be world-changers. Many would be martyrs in the process. Thirteen of those students would eventually be found memorialized in Britain’s Dictionary of National Biography.
The training was so intense, that there is record of some of the students dying in training!
Out of the meager 200 graduates, most were sent to nations where no missionary had ever been sent before. Not only did David eventually hand-select Robert to go to China, but he sent his students for the first time to be missionaries to Malta, Demerara, Siberia, Africa, Calcutta, Madras, Travancore, Islands in the South Seas, Surat, Java, Bellary, Benares, Malaysia, Burma, Singapore, Malta, Bangalore, Macao, Hong Kong, Ghent, Trinidad, as well as to Flanders, France, the USA, Australia, and Canada.
The missionaries produced at Gosport were not timid, academic Christians—they were gladiators, knowingly entering the ring of the beasts. They didn’t run from death; they waited in line for their turn. Standing at the dark gates of hell like a disciplined Thracian, curved sword of the Word of God in hand, crested with the helmet of salvation and with a visor of tunnel vision for preaching the Gospel.
The beasts were not the only predators in the arena. The missionaries of Gosport seemed possessed with a hunger for battle, not simply finding pleasure in remaining spectators. The winning of souls was prized by both sides, and the stakes could not be higher.
Blood was required of Christ, and so was it with His disciples. There is no pleasure in death, but it is there where glory is found. The students of Gosport would be legally condemned again and again, but their conscience would not be polluted with mediocrity. Robert was entering into the colosseum of warriors where the most gruesome martyrdom was not only permitted against them, but demanded by the wild hordes that attacked them. However, that was not the worst part.
The worst part likely was when the crowds, representing the very people that God had called them to come and save, cheered and jeered at their tortuously slow and painful slaughter.
Mercy did not entertain these crowds, only the sight of agony on the missionary’s face, begging for clemency and receiving butchery, satiated the taunting masses. The crowds did not come to the arena to hear the missionary’s message of salvation. They came to entertain themselves with their gashing wounds and gaping injuries. In fact, they would boo the missionary’s demise if it came too quickly. As much as they hated delays, they hated hasty homicides even more. They desired to savor the taste of the missionary’s blood as it gently flowed out, soaked up by the dusty ground.
In late May 1804, Robert set foot on the Gosport campus for the first time and was the first meeting he would have with Dr. David Bogue.
The primary property was the grounds of an old chapel and was disconnected from every residential home surrounding it. The steeple reached up with a chalk-white pointed roof that pierced into the sky. Inside, the plain, red brick building could host about 1,000 people.
Its fragmented presence was less of a campus and more of a sad ghetto with bleeding borders that did not begin or end.
Stubborn trees stood staggered throughout the grove, lined with well-worn footpaths going to and from where eager students ran from class to class. No one cared to manicure the grounds. It was never in the budget, and even if it were, the money would still not be used for such a purpose. Not even one flower was found guilty of visiting the campus; there were only weeds accused of being flowers.
Just outside the boundary of the churchyard stood charming British cottages where the students lived together with families from the church. They didn’t have traditional dorms, so each student waited to be adopted by a member of the congregation.
The small homes surrounding the chapel testified with songs of ownership and looked as warm as a sunny day in July. Outlines of empty flower beds where colorful fauna might have been, surrounded each plot. Only seasonal ivy plants with thick stems and dull green leaves clawed their way up the side of the little chateaus, forever clinging to vertical walls.
Robert made his way across the mulched grass, looking for anyone with a friendly face that might know where he was supposed to be. He stopped and stood under a low hanging branch from a forward leaning birch tree, sat his drab green satchel on the ground, and dug around in it for a moment looking for the paper that they had given him at the office of the London Missionary Society.
“Are you Robert?” came a cordial voice from a short distance away. Robert looked up and saw a short, slim young man walking briskly toward him. His fiery red hair looked as Irish as two-day-old Guinness stew, and his sickly pale face announced that he didn’t have long to be exposed to the elements before being scorched by the sun.
“Are you Robert?” he asked again. The young man held out his hand in front of him, matching it with his strong stride forward, “I will take you to meet with the director of education, Dr. Bogue.”
Robert followed the man to a building off of the main road, only a few blocks from the shorelines of the English Channel. Over the doorway of No. 5, High Street, Gosport, was a metal plaque bearing the inscription: David Bogue, M.A., D.D.
Dr. David Bogue was the minister of the Independent Chapel and the only professor for the entire academy. There was only one professor for every subject – Dr. Bogue. It felt almost surreal that he was going to meet with the famous theologian. After reading his articles month after month in Evangelical Magazine, Dr. Bogue had taken on an almost mythical status in Robert’s mind.
When Robert followed He into Dr. Bogue’s office, he was stepping into the threshold of legacy. Three previous students who had walked through that same door had been killed in India, and one was dying a painful death, just at that moment, on the other side of the world in the Pacific Islands.
Robert walked into the square room of moderate dimensions, comfortably furnished without ostentation. A warm fire blazed in the hearth, flickering shadows of light off the dark, heavy curtains flanking the only window on the far side of the room.
On the left were large, looming oil paintings of well-known ministers and founders of the nonconformist movement. Their majestic pose and ardent gaze commanded an audience for Dr. Bogue’s office visitors when waiting in silence.
There was a leather couch on one side of the fireplace, sitting opposite from the dark walnut-colored desk. Looking up from the desk was a slouched man whose balding head was weathered by wisdom. His eyes glanced up with palpable inquiry and twinkled with suspicion.
“Dr. Bogue, this is Robert Morrison,” Mr. He said.
Dr. Bogue grunted as if that was enough to be both an answer and a greeting. His face contorted as if he had just put something sour in his mouth. His broad shoulders, though slumped, exuded a countenance of massive strength, capable of bearing a heavy load, both physically and emotionally.
There was an unspoken shrewdness in his demeanor that gave one the impression that he would not waste his time with those inclined to waste time.
Robert looked closer at his white locks of hair coming down from the bald top on each side meeting with the sides of his sideburns which covered his ears. Like a puritan, he kept his face shaved and wore all black except a flowing white silk scarf wrapped haphazardly around his neck, undoubtedly done in a hurry. His black priestly coat, that he didn’t remove, even in the leisure of his own office, hung all the way down past his hips and under the desk. Robert could see from his jutting jawline, his underbite was strongly locked into place.
“May I inquire, Doctor, where will Mr. Morrison be living?” He asked, obviously not wanting to intrude one second longer than was absolutely necessary.
The students of the academy did not live in a dorm or in the house with Dr. Bogue, which was undoubtedly a wise decision set from the beginning of the academy. It was obvious that the reverend lived a very self-denying life to such an extent, that he would have expected too much from the young students.
“Hmmm . . . ” the doctor grunted, as he seemed to think where Robert would fit. “Put him with Joseph Fray,” he barked. “Go along now before it gets too dark.” With that the pair turned toward the door. “Wait!” Dr. Bogue called. “Here!” he said, pulling a piece of paper from one of the drawers from his desk and handing it out for him to take. Mr. He quickly grabbed the paper and both he and Robert scurried out the door.
“Oh, you are going to like living with Fray and his host family. Fray is from Germany and came to be trained as a missionary for South Africa.”
Robert’s ears perked up immediately at the sound of South Africa. “I would love to be a missionary to South Africa,” Robert said as they walked across the grassy knoll.
“Oh, he isn’t training for South Africa any longer. Dr. Bogue has other plans for him.”
“Really?” Robert inquired.
“Yeah, you see, Joseph Fray is of Jewish descent, and Dr. Bogue believes that it is our duty as Christians to share the Gospel of Christ with the Jewish people.”
“So where will he go then?” asked Robert, a little perplexed. “There’s no such thing as a Jewish country. They are basically all over the world, speaking different languages, and really difficult to target.”
“Yes, but there are many English-speaking Jews here in England. Anyway,” He continued, “You will also be living in the same house as Mr. W.C. Loveless and J.A. James. You are going to love them.”
“Will we live alone, or . . . ” Robert asked, kind of already knowing the answer. He had heard about the living situation at Gosport. There were actually no specifically dedicated buildings or housing for the Academy. The entire educational structure was built around one building, the chapel, and one person, Dr. David Bogue.
“No, you will live with a host family from the church. The host families are very kind. They cook for you, often invite you to be with their family over the holidays, and that kind of thing. Oh! And word of caution,” He interjected, “if you are not happy with the living arrangements, you might want to keep that to yourself while you are here.”
“Why?”
“When Dr. Bogue envisioned this school, he dreamed of a mission training center where prospective missionaries would not have to pay anything, right? Well, this guy named George
Welch, a wealthy London banker, came along, loved Dr. Bogue’s idea, and agreed to sponsor the entire thing. The banker donates £10 per student per year for tuition and an additional £25 for room and board. This is paid to the families.”
Robert nodded as he followed along both conversationally and physically, keeping up with Mr. He’s pace.
“Well last year we had these two students, George Thorn and William Milne, who were living with Mrs. Shepherd. Well, let’s just say that they were not entirely pleased with living at Mrs. Shepherd’s house, so they felt that they should be able to choose who gets the money for their room and board, suggesting even that they could live on their own and find their own accommodation. When they approached Dr. Bogue about it, Dr. Bogue would hear nothing about them going off to live on their own, so George and William wrote a letter directly to the London Missionary Society. As soon as Dr. Bogue heard about it, he expelled them saying, ‘Because of their delicacy, they should just leave the academy.’”
Robert turned and looked at Mr. He as they both kept walking, then Robert glanced down at the paper in his hand given by Dr. Bogue. There were five very simple instructions for each day written on the paper.
EXPECTED DAILY
- Endeavour to spend an hour in the morning, before school, in prayer, examination, with pious reading.
- Converse on literature at or after breakfast.
- Engage in recreation, reading, writing, and study before and after dinner.
- After half-past seven, pray, recollect, and self-examination.
- Immediately after supper, retire to study, and go to bed at twelve.
When he arrived at the little cottage, Mr. He knocked on the door and was greeted by a young man of about the same age. Robert was introduced to the five other candidates that he would be living with: Fray, the German that he had already heard about, as well as McDonald, James, and Messrs. Loveless and Taylor.
Though small with few students, each candidate came with a unique vocation ranging from blacksmiths to whitesmiths, shoemakers, carpenters, gardeners, rope-makers, boat-builders, and ceramists. Rarely did anyone meet the children of clergy members already involved in full-time ministry. Gosport was not a place for those accepted in traditional ministry. It was an academy for working-class outsiders who held a vision that did not fit with the national identity of England.
After settling in for the evening, Robert looked out the small window at the edge of his bed and felt at ease. Something felt right about being there. He already felt like he fit in, as if he somehow found his very own tribe.
Before closing his eyes, he wrote, “My mind is comfortable, and resigned to the Lord’s pleasure concerning me. I, as formerly, have ‘ to fight with sins, and doubts, and fears.’ Such I expect will be my experience, while I continue in this world. Christ crucified is all my hope and desire.”
The workload was intense. Robert thought that he was extremely self-disciplined compared to every peer he had ever had in the past. He was an early riser and attempted to stay productive from morning until evening, but nothing prepared him for the workload at Gosport.
He entered into the semester in the middle of the system of divinity, and the first lectures he had to copy and study were “The Freedom of the Will,” a series developed around the teachings of Jonathan Edwards, the great American revivalist, who Dr. Bogue deeply loved.
Though Robert loved the reading, he struggled to keep from drowning in his workload. His schedule included Orientation Lectures, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Theology, Old Testament Survey, New Testament Survey, Evidences of Christianity, Jewish Antiquities, Missionary Lectures, Pastoral Office, Universal Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric, Ecclesiastical History, Pre-Christian Dispensations, Geography, Astronomy, Composition, Mathematics, Natural Philosophy and Physics, and Preaching.
Tests were not limited to Biblical exams, but the students were examined in Horace, Livy, Ovid, Virgil, Caesar, and Tacitus. They were tested in Home, Xenophon, and Demosthenes with the exams written in Greek.
As a scholar from a Scottish University in Edinburgh, Dr. Bogue was not ideological, evangelical, unitarian, or Protestant. He was a nonconformist follower of Jesus Christ and was passionate about debate and free thinking.
He was also an advocate of being on time and never accepted tardiness. Students who didn’t come to class on time were never to return to class again.
Most of the classes took place in the same unnoticeable room of about thirty feet in length and
eighteen feet wide. The table, the only thing resembling a lectern, sat in front of the professor’s chair.
The students sat in worn, worm-eaten pews that were often stiff, not because they were made of hardwood, but because they unexplainably retained the solid matter of cold air.
The library, if one could be so liberal to call it that, was really one wall of shelves, clumsily filled with volumes of donated old Puritan Theology books and tattered dictionaries. There were large, empty spaces where books on Jewish Antiquities had been. They were rarely on the shelves because Dr. Bogue put such an emphasis on the foundations of Judaism and praying for the nation of Israel.
In February of 1805, David led the Missionary Society to outline thirteen resolutions on behalf of their plan to reach the Jews. David asked the Christians to show Abraham’s descendants gratitude, because, after all, salvation was of the Jews. He also pleaded, from the bases of equity and justice, that Christians should give the Gospel back to those who have suffered so much from the hands of the Gentiles.
David often quoted his most beloved American preacher, Jonathan Edwards, and read his books aloud to the classroom as a part of his lectures. In addition to Edwards, David pushed the writings of Luther, Calvin, Charnock, Owens, M’Laurin, Doddridge, Witherspoon, and Boyse.
Dr. Bogue was also fond of teaching subjects that were not often found in theological training—like astronomy and geography. He frequently joked that missionaries who were called to the ends of the earth, “should at least know how to get there.”
In addition to classroom lectures, students were required to go out and preach the Gospel in the “highways and bi-ways.” While other Bible seminaries like Oxford and Cambridge recommended no preaching for the first year, Gosport threw their students into the fray. This added to the stress and workload of every student, but also served as an outlet for all of the materials that they were consuming on a daily basis.
There was something self-serving about preaching messages every two weeks utilizing the materials in the classroom. Sharing with others helped increase the retention of the curriculum.
Living in the small port town of Gosport had its advantages. The training at Gosport was much like the town itself. It had the narrowness of a small country town, without the rural simplicity.
Comparing the academy to the larger, established seminaries was similar to comparing Gosport to its big brother, Portsmouth, the metropolitan directly across the harbor. It is impossible to escape the shadow, but there are benefits to being smaller that must be capitalized on. Just as Portsmouth was polluted by her own fortunes, so too were the more well-known seminaries.
Dr. Bogue believed that the school should be hard enough to discourage students. David specifically selected students that were a little older because he believed that they had enough time in life to have already denied their faith if they were going to.
He wanted to create the kind of pressure that would help identify flakes that were likely to deny Christ in the midnight hour. Older students were less likely to flake on the field. There was a maturity level that was common amongst the students at Gosport. Bogue was a serious man that demanded serious students. If you were late to class, he kicked you out. If you failed exams, he kicked you out. If you complained, he kicked you out.
He didn’t deal with complainers. “If they complain during education, they will complain during execution,” he used to say to his class.
Not everyone who went to Gosport enjoyed Dr. Bogue’s methods. Several students were known to have been kicked out and others known to quit.
One well-known student who had left Gosport was Samuel Leigh.
Samuel was the son of an engineer from Staffordshire County in the Midlands of England. He wanted to be a missionary more than anything and was extremely determined, but just didn’t fit in with the style and teaching of Dr. Bogue.
He attended Gosport for a short duration, before he found the differences were simply too great to reconcile. After a severe disagreement over Calvinistic teachings, Samuel notoriously stood up and walked out of the classroom, never returning to the academy.
He is known to later join the training of the Wesleyan Missionary Society (WMS) and was sent as a missionary to New South Wales in Australia.
Some students, however, did not leave alive.
One such student was Owen. Owen had grown up in a poor, hardworking family. Like many at the school, he felt a strong calling to take the Word of God into the most unreached areas of the world and came to Gosport to best prepare for mission work.
Owen’s host family was connected by a short walking path to the house where Robert lived. Robert and Owen had grown somewhat close in the months that they had been together at Gosport; as close as two people could be when given such little time.
One day, while suffering with extreme fatigue, Owen lost his balance. He needed to lie down, so Robert assisted him back to his room. Something about his eyes were unsatisfactory and suspect. Owen was not well. Robert dared not leave his bedside.
There was a morose silence that filled the room like a heavy, thick fog and the same smell that Robert remembered from the day that his mother died. It was not always proper for two men to hold hands, even in the most needy of times, but nothing felt more right. Owen reached up and grabbed Robert’s hand as if he was trying to pull himself out of water and into a boat.
Robert refused to leave him alone. He would stay with him until the moment passed, but the better moment never came.
Instead of getting better, Owen grew rapidly weaker. Within minutes his youthful, round, somewhat rose-colored face had a sickly, grayish yellow tint to it. His eyes grew blank and less alert. Owen no longer looked like the charming friend Robert had seen just moments ago, but instead looked expressionless, lost, vacant. A watery film built up around his eyes, making them appear glassy.
“Water?” Robert asked. “You need water, that will make you feel better,” he said to himself more than Owen, but when he attempted to get up, Owen stayed clutched to his hand. Owen had just enough energy to hang on to the last person who would ever see him alive.
Robert knew the grip well. He didn’t whisper even a word, but the expression of fear and loss communicated through the stiffening of his spine.
Robert wanted to run and get help but didn’t want to leave Owen. Instead, Robert held his hand, squeezed it to communicate that everything would be okay, and then began to pray. Robert prayed for strength. He prayed for healing. He prayed for complete restoration, but the more he prayed, the worse Owen got.
A moment later, Owen’s eyes began to twitch unexpectedly. They fluttered up and down as if he were trying to wink code to Robert. Suddenly, without warning, Owen shot up, grabbed Robert around the neck, Robert hugged him, and then pushed out the words, “It is well that it was in thine heart.”
Then, Owen’s spirit was released, leaving his limp body in Robert’s embrace and his words lingering in the air.
It all happened in less than two hours.
The entire community of Gosport rallied around Owen and celebrated his life. His memory rested on the campus, and they all thought of him with fondness.
Robert turned to his journal and wrote.
Our lives are but a vapor that appears for a little time, and then vanishes away, but if the vapor should vanish while the soul is yet uninterested in the Lord Jesus, how sad the situation! A mere profession of faith in the Lord Jesus will not do without repentance and Godly sorrow for sin, and the love of God shed abroad in the heart. I am afraid they remain prayerless, and if so, then Christless.
Owen’s death made Robert come face-to-face with his own fragility. He was convinced that death lurked around the corner and waited for him. The letters to his family often included, “My friends, it is probable I shall never see you again in this world.”
He believed in the imminent return of Christ and did not embrace the idea of returning home ever again.
He continued in his journal:
By reason of sin, I loathe myself in dust and ashes, and fly to the peace-speaking blood of Christ, to receive the forgiveness of it. I wish it were engravened on my mind, as with a pen of iron, that nothing without study and reflection can fill the mind. When I look back on the past week, I can scarcely tell what I have been doing. I seem to myself to be better able to tell what I have not done.
He stops writing for a moment, thinks about his calling and what is required for him to complete it, and admits, “Of many of these pre-requisites I am deficient.”
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