TO
MY WIFE
AN APPRECIATION
Missionary biography is one of the most interesting and instructive of studies. It is, however, a department of missionary literature to which Americans have not made proportionate contribution. The foreign missionary Societies of the United States now represent more missionaries and a larger expenditure than the European Societies, but most of the great missionary biographies are of British and Continental missionaries, so that many Americans do not realize that there are men connected with their own Societies whose lives have been characterized by eminent devotion and large achievement.
Because I regarded Dr. McGilvary as one of the great missionaries of the Church Universal, I urged him several years ago to write his autobiography. He was then over seventy-five years of age, and I told him that he could not spend his remaining strength to any better advantage to the cause he loved than in preparing such a volume. His life was not only one of unusual length (he lived to the ripe age of eighty-three), but his missionary service of fifty-three years covered an interesting part of the history of missionary work in Siam, and the entire history, thus far, of the mission to the Lāo people of northern Siam. There is no more fascinating story in fiction or in that truth which is stranger than fiction, than the story of his discovery of a village of strange speech near his station at Pechaburī, Siam, his learning the language of the villagers, his long journey with his friend, Dr. Jonathan Wilson, into what was then the unknown region of northern Siam, pushing his little boat up the great river and pausing not until he had gone six hundred miles northward and arrived at the city of Chiengmai. The years that followed were years of toil and privation, of loneliness and sometimes of danger; but the missionaries persevered with splendid faith and courage until the foundations of a prosperous Mission were laid.
In all the marked development of the Lāo Mission, Dr. McGilvary was a leader—the leader. He laid the foundations of medical work, introducing quinine and vaccination among a people scourged by malaria and smallpox, a work which has now developed into five hospitals and a leper asylum. He began educational work, which is now represented by eight boarding schools and twenty-two elementary schools, and is fast expanding into a college, a medical college, and a theological seminary. He was the evangelist who won the first converts, founded the first church, and had a prominent part in founding twenty other churches, and in developing a Lāo Christian Church of four thousand two hundred and five adult communicants. His colleague, the Rev. Dr. W. C. Dodd, says that Dr. McGilvary selected the sites for all the present stations of the Mission long before committees formally sanctioned the wisdom of his choice. He led the way into regions beyond and was the pioneer explorer into the French Lāo States, eastern Burma, and even up to the borders of China. Go where you will in northern Siam, or in many sections of the extra-Siamese Lāo States, you will find men and women to whom Dr. McGilvary first brought the Good News. He well deserves the name so frequently given him even in his lifetime—“The Apostle to the Lāo.”
It was my privilege to conduct our Board’s correspondence with Dr. McGilvary for more than a decade, and, in 1902, to visit him in his home and to journey with him through an extensive region. I have abiding and tender memories of those memorable days. He was a Christian gentleman of the highest type, a man of cultivation and refinement, of ability and scholarship, of broad vision and constructive leadership. His evangelistic zeal knew no bounds. A toilsome journey on elephants through the jungles brought me to a Saturday night with the weary ejaculation: “Now we can have a day of rest!” The next morning I slept late; but Dr. McGilvary did not; he spent an hour before breakfast in a neighbouring village, distributing tracts and inviting the people to come to a service at our camp at ten o’clock. It was an impressive service,—under a spreading bo tree, with the mighty forest about us, monkeys curiously peering through the tangled vines, the huge elephants browsing the bamboo tips behind us, and the wondering people sitting on the ground, while one of the missionaries told the deathless story of redeeming love. But Dr. McGilvary was not present. Seventy-four years old though he was, he had walked three miles under a scorching sun to another village and was preaching there, while Dr. Dodd conducted the service at our camp. And I said: “If that is the way Dr. McGilvary rests, what does he do when he works?” Dr. McKean, his associate of many years, writes:
“No one who has done country evangelistic work with Dr. McGilvary can ever forget the oft-seen picture of the gray-haired patriarch seated on the bamboo floor of a thatch-covered Lāo house, teaching some one to read. Of course, the book faced the pupil, and it was often said that he had taught so many people in this way that he could read the Lāo character very readily with the book upside down. Little children instinctively loved him, and it is therefore needless to say that he loved them. In spite of his long snow-white beard, never seen in men of this land and a strange sight to any Lāo child, the children readily came to him. Parents have been led to God because Dr. McGilvary loved their children and laid his hands upon them. In no other capacity was the spirit of the man more manifest than in that of a shepherd. Always on the alert for every opportunity, counting neither time nor distance nor the hardship of inclement weather, swollen streams, pathless jungle, or impassable road, he followed the example of his Master in seeking to save the lost. His very last journey, which probably was the immediate cause of his last illness, was a long, wearisome ride on horseback, through muddy fields and deep irrigating ditches, to visit a man whom he had befriended many years ago and who seemed to be an inquirer.”