RELIGIOUS CONVICTIONS
Closely associated with the motives to enter the mission field are a man’s religious convictions. Those earlier missionaries were conspicuous for their lively sense of peril for impenitent souls. Dr. House had a spiritual sensitiveness which shared this feeling to the full. Frequent lamentation is to be found in his journal for the certain perdition of ones with whom he had been acquainted, and who died without an evidence of accepting the Christian faith. This was not merely a professional attitude towards the heathen. Upon news of the death of an old school mate he exclaims:
“Oh, did he die safely! What would I not give to be assured he did. But oh, I tremble. Procrastination thou art the thief of time, the murderer of souls. And conscience reproaches me with having too long postponed the sending to him that letter on the subject of the claims of personal religion, a draught of which has for years been lying in my portfolio. It might, under the blessing of the Holy One, have done him good—at any rate it was my duty, my privilege to invite him, to urge him to walk with me towards heaven. I have sinned. I have been unfaithful.”
When a Siamese lad who had been connected with the mission for a few months was suddenly carried off by the cholera, the anguish of the doctor brought him to tears of self-reproach, not because his skill had failed but because he had not been more insistent in urging the gospel upon the boy.
At this distance of time one can see that the failure of some of the Siamese to be persuaded was due to a want of concatenation in the heathen mind between the physical facts already familiar to them but not comprehended, and the spiritual truths of this new religion. Behind the sublime faith of the missionary there was a rigidity of logic which failed to take these mental difficulties into account; as for instance when a young priest proposed this dilemma: “Who was the mother of Jesus? Mary. Who made Mary? God. Was Jesus Christ God? Yes. But if Jesus Christ was God, how could He make Mary his mother before He Himself was born?” Turning from the disputant, the doctor declined to discuss the problem because he thought the man was caviling.
At one period the doctor entertained a vivid expectation of the culmination of the Christian dispensation at an early date. He had enough of the mystical in his religious nature to look for signs. Thus he writes in view of the conditions of Europe in 1848:
“All Europe, every kingdom has felt the shock of the political earthquake in France. Kingdoms, principalities and powers tremble. These are signs that herald the near approach of the Coming One. The day of the world’s redemption surely draweth nigh.”
And again two years later he writes to Dr. D. B. McCartee at Ningpo:
“Surely the world must needs wait for but few of the signs, that are to herald His coming, to be fulfilled. ‘Wars and rumors of wars,’ earthquake and pestilence and famine, the ‘running to and fro,’ the gospel preached for a witness in every nation—what signs of the ‘ends drawing nigh’ is left unfulfilled in our day—unless it be that a few countries (central Africa, New Guinea, etc.) remain still unevangelised. The last of God’s elect, however, may be born—nay, the messenger who is to call him, in Providence may have started on his errand; and who knows but that privilege is for you or me.”
But that type of speculation has its own antidote, viz., time. As his years drew out their number, the visions of youth gave way to the dreams of old men; and in reviewing what had been achieved and what remained to be accomplished the doctor displaced these speculations with the simple faith that the Lord would come again in His own time, but at a time unrevealed to men. It needs to be remembered that Dr. House had been trained in medicine, not in theology. Whatever may have been illogical in his tenets, there was in his heart the profound conviction not only that Jesus Christ was the only Saviour of the world, but that the Siamese would accept the Christian religion, if only they could be induced to examine fairly its claims.