A GENTLE GROWL.
I love to look over the columns of religious intelligence in the Congregationalist, the Advance, the Pacific. I say to myself: “How well the churches are doing! How happy all these ministers must be! How little they have to annoy, to worry, to depress! How much to make them glad and even jubilant!” Yet, a few days pass, and possibly one of these very ministers knocks at my study door, to talk over, confidentially, the pains, the difficulties, the heavy burdens of his work; a root of bitterness which he has tried in vain to remove, now springing up to trouble him; finances going all awry; sad cases calling for discipline,—the duty imperative, and the church, though stung to the quick with a sense of its dishonor, too timid to come up to its task. Of course, such things ought not to go into the papers nor any other but the good and glad things. We can make others sharers of our joys, but we shrink from asking them to bear, with us, our pains.
“Well, that is all right,” I say to myself, and so it is. And yet those who sustain a missionary work have a right to see it on all sides. God be thanked that I have had so much to report that was cheery, stimulating, hopeful; so little that was otherwise. I wonder if our friends and helpers—readers of the Missionary—think that, like the harvest fields of California, so our Gospel work is bathed in perpetual sunshine? or do they know that here, too, we have our darkened skies, our tempests untimely, our frosts premature?
“Well, it won’t hurt them if they don’t see the shady side,” I say to myself again.
“Yes, but am I truthful in the matter?” I reply, and so even conscience puts me up to make a gentle growl. There is nothing very bad to growl about; no more probably than I need; far less than I deserve; but there is something, almost always, on which if one allowed himself to brood, he could soon get up steam to scold hard. And I am not thinking just here of the greater trials of our work, as when some riotous outburst of anti-Chinese prejudice sends these people at sunset to their several retreats, and seems, for the time, to knock our schools prostrate; nor of the sore trials from false brethren among our Chinese Christians—starting discords in the little flocks—or by their vile conduct bringing reproach on the Gospel that they have proclaimed. Those things, I am grateful to say, belong to years past; and, besides, we don’t growl at the great trials—it is the comparatively little things that put us in a scolding mood.
For instance: here is a teacher who has done well—been faithful, skilful and successful; has won the intense affection—almost the reverence of her pupils. But her heart is young, and somebody else’s heart is young also, and these two have grown together, till, in an hour of general congratulation, their hands are joined, and they start off upon life’s journey no longer twain. Then the same zeal, the same concentration of interest and effort which made her so successful a teacher, is developed touching home cares and a husband’s comfort; and weeks grow to months and months to years, and her face is not seen, even for an hour, in the school-room where she served so well. She did not mean it so to be; but so it was, and the shrewd heathen Chinese, that was almost persuaded in view of her zeal and self-denial to become a Christian, thinks now that he sees through it all: “Good pay, good teach; no pay, no teach.”
Here is another teacher who took up the work with zeal and loved it—so she said and so she thought; better and better the longer she wrought. But she is cumbered with much serving all day long, and brings a weak flesh, and, consequently, a not very willing spirit to her evening’s service at the mission. The pupils note it. It is indeed unmistakable, for the head nods and the eyes close, time and again, before the last school hour is half expired. They don’t like to burden her, and one by one they drop out of the school. The Superintendent intervenes as gently as he can; but he finds that it is very difficult to dismiss a teacher and not lose a friend.
Here is a field where the opportunity is evidently large, and the gate to it seems wide open. You enter it hopefully. Plans seem to form themselves almost without your thinking. Arrangements are made and the work begins. Then it appears the arrangements were not made; that you “reckoned without your host;” his plans and yours do not exactly dovetail, and in this case a miss is as good, and as ill, as a mile. Delays ensue; disappointment and failure seem inevitable. The very elements seem to have conspired against you. And yet that opportunity must not be lost, for there are golden harvests possible in that wide-open field, and, somehow, you must reap them.
It is getting past the middle of your fiscal year. We have tried hard to make one dollar do the work of two, and yet the appropriation is well nigh exhausted. Contributions come in slowly. The churches, you fancy, have forgotten this work; or, possibly they dare not propose it among their charities. You sally forth, subscription book in hand. You take the easy ones first, the men that you “know” will give. But they respond to your “know” with a different “No.” and you draw back to your retirement, you enter into your closet, and learn to go forth the next time in the use of a coinage and a wisdom not your own and prayer, or the prayer-hearing Master, pulls you through, so that when the year ends the year’s bills are all paid and you take a fresh start for the next twelve-months’ campaign.
But a truce to all this. Who expects to make a voyage and encounter no storms? Who can hope to win a battle without finding that there are blows to take as well as blows to give? Our Master never promised us that just now the currents should float in either to the fulfilment of our task or the attainment of a full salvation; but forewarning us that in the world we should have great trials and tribulation, he adds, “Be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.”
I conclude with this little extract from a letter just received from a new helper, Jue Lee, whom we have sent to Oroville: “Now the school is here first-rate getting on. We have almost thirty scholars every night, but Mr. Ostrom, [Pastor of the church, W. C. P.], read the Bible also. I explain China to them. Now I hope God open their ears to hear; find out this true light soon, and come to worship same God. But Christ is a faithful Saviour, and will not forsake those who put their trust in Him. But I, at first, dislike here; it seem everything so strange to me. Now that I remember what the Bible says: ‘But the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head’ [I am content]. Now I hope God give me power to preach and soon they will be all converted.”