MISSION WORK AMONG THE CHINESE MINERS.
REV. W. C. POND, SAN FRANCISCO.
Can it be done? That is the question. That it needs to be done, there can be no question. There is scarcely a mining camp in the State but has its Chinese quarter, and there are many small camps where the entire population is Chinese, because Americans view the placers as worked out. Close upon every advancing wave of Caucasian emigration, these follow into Nevada, Utah, Idaho, Montana, and, just now, Arizona especially. Thither all but two of those in Santa Barbara, of whom we hoped that they were born of God, have gone, and one of the last two writes me that he is soon going. On the other hand, two of our best brethren in Oakland have just migrated to Montana; one of them, Lee Haim, who was our excellent helper at Oroville till taken from our work by a peremptory summons to return to China. This doom has been commuted, but only upon his undertaking to remit amounts larger than he could possibly save out of a helper’s salary. The other of the two is Len Soon, a man of fine presence, good judgment, warm heart and earnest Christian spirit, whose ever-ready volunteer aid made him a pillar in our Oakland work.
These losses at the points already occupied, suggest one way in which God, taking the matter into his own hands, is sending the Gospel to the Chinese in the mines. They afford a partial solution of the problem before us. A portion of our scattered seed is made to fall upon those moral wildernesses. We follow these brethren with our prayers; and I have ventured to pledge to them our practical co-operation if they should settle in any place where a hopeful missionary work could be begun.
But a hopeful work of this sort, anywhere in the mines, could scarcely be conceived of but for faith. The difficulties are unique, and are very great. Our Home Missionary Society finds no other service so fraught with discouragements, as that in these regions. The toil required is very hard, and the returns are very scanty. Some churches have been thrifty, and one or two are thrifty still; but outside a less number of points than you could count on the fingers of one hand, they are either dead or perpetually dying; preserved from utter extinction only by persistent pastoral service, sustained mainly by missionary aid. But the difficulties encountered in such work among our own people, will be greatly enhanced in labor among the Chinese. Miners are always migratory, but the Chinese miners most of all; and migration tends to barbarism, among the Chinese most of all. Miners depend upon luck. There is no possibility of knowing what there is in a piece of ground till you have worked it through, and gotten it out. A single day may show your season’s work to be a success, or may doom it as a failure, and what that day will disclose no sagacity will enable you beforehand to determine. Such occupations nurse the gambling spirit, favor spendthrift habits, and tend almost irresistibly to poverty. And this is specially true of the Chinese. In certain seasons of the year, miners are apt to be waiting and idle; in others, when the golden harvest must be gathered, if at all, working to excess; and in either case, the moral effect is evil, not less so with Chinese than others. American miners, with a few noble exceptions, seem to know little about the Christian Sabbath. It used to be, and in some parts of California it still is, the day for cleaning-up, for coming to the central village for trading, for gambling, for getting drunk; but even this distinction in the more prominent mining districts is passing away, and the wheels of labor roll remorselessly over the laborer’s best boon, the weekly day of sacred rest. How much less can we hope for the help of Sabbaths in reaching with the Gospel the Chinese?
And yet, there they are, by the hundreds and the thousands, precious souls, bought with the blood of Jesus. Must we let them die, without a single hand stretched out, a single voice uplifted for their rescue?
The mission at Oroville was our first attempt to deal with this problem of work among the Chinese miners. It was begun, so far as downright and determined effort was concerned, February 1st, and continued till June 1st. The school is closed during the hot months, but will be resumed, I trust, about October 1st. In some respects it has fulfilled our hopes, and abundantly repaid our somewhat large expenditures. Six Chinese are reported as converted, but we did not reach many of the miners through the school, as such. They would come to hear Lee Haim or Lem Chung preach, thronging the little mission house sometimes, and listening to the Gospel, as, indeed, news, good news possibly, with eyes fixed and ears and even mouths wide open, to receive the words. But coming and going, here to-day to trade at the temple for luck and at the stores for “grub,” to-morrow gone we know not where, we could learn but little of the work that good news wrought within their hearts.
It is evident, however, that if we are to reach our Chinese mining population it must be mainly through evangelistic service—a mission school at some central point, as a headquarters, and a well-trained helper to go forth from it, preaching here and there on Sundays and on week days, in the cabins or on the streets, wherever he can induce his countrymen to lend him a listening ear. And in order to this, we ought to be training helpers by the dozen where now we are training one; not by sending them to Academies or opening for them a Theological Seminary, but by putting them to work and letting them learn to preach by preaching. This was Wesley’s method for those half heathen among whom his victories were gained in England, and I am persuaded that it is the beat method for these whole heathen for whom our struggle is going on to-day. Do not educate the helpers up out of the range of easy sympathy with those from whom they spring and among whom they go, but let teaching and working, lesson and practice, go hand in hand. I am eager to do more of this next year than we have ever done. I am greatly encouraged respecting it, by the results vouchsafed to us already; but how to do it aright, with the resources now at command, I do not, and I fear, I cannot see, for the rules of arithmetic are against it, and those rules are stubborn things. You cannot, in this case, reduce the multiplicand (i. e. the helper’s salary, for it is at the lowest point that justice will admit already), and you cannot increase the multiplier (the number of helpers) without enlarging the product (i. e. the expense to be met and the drafts to be made). What shall we do about it?