James Gilmour of Mongolia: His diaries, letters, and reports

by James Gilmour

Towards the end of 1882 James Gilmour entered upon a long series of meetings on behalf of the London Missionary Society, consisting of sermons and addresses to Sunday School children on the Sunday, and speeches at public meetings during the week. A long series of his letters written to his wife between November 1882 and March 1883 is still extant, and they form an impressive record of the work considered suitable for a wearied missionary at home in search of rest and change. He visited Edinburgh, Falkirk, Glasgow, Liverpool, Kilsyth, Hamilton, Paisley, Dundee, St Andrews, Arbroath, Lytham, Aberdeen, Montrose, Manchester, Hingham, Cambridge, Norfolk, and Southampton. And this list exhausts only a portion of his excursions on the effort to stimulate and develope the faith and the zeal of the churches at home. His wanderings brought him into contact sometimes with relatives, sometimes with old college friends, now grave pastors fast hastening towards middle life. The meetings he attended always added to the circle of his friends, for none could hear his ringing voice, and feel the clasp of his hand, and pass under the influence of his ardent enthusiasm on behalf of the great enterprise of the modern Christian Church without receiving an impression never likely to be effaced.

He in turn experienced a strong and abiding spiritual refreshment from this renewal, after twelve years' absence, of touch and fellowship with the Christian life of Great Britain. His earnestness deepened, he studied with intensest interest movements like the Salvation Army, then coming into great prominence, and other agencies for improving the religious life of the nation, and he rejoiced in all fellowship with other disciples of the Lord Jesus which had for its aim the strengthening of the life of faith.

He rejoiced greatly when at infrequent intervals a Sunday came upon which he was entirely free from engagements. Such rare occasions he utilised very fully for spiritual edification. He was somewhat hampered in his possibilities on these days by the fact that his temporary home was at Bexley Heath, and his strong Sabbatarian views never permitted him to travel by rail or omnibus on the Lord's Day. The following letter shows how he passed one of these days.

'Yesterday being a fine day I left home at 7.15 A.M., walked to London (twelve miles), got to Spurgeon's at 10.30. Had a permit from a seat-holder, was close to the platform, heard a good earnest sermon, was introduced to Spurgeon in the vestry after service, went home to one of his deacons for dinner, there met an American who had under Mr. Moody been converted from drunkenness to God, and whose craving for drink was as instantaneously and as thoroughly expelled as the devils by Christ of old. After dinner visited Spurgeon's Stockwell Orphanages, then walked to Camberwell and dropped in, in passing, at the Catholic Apostolic Church and heard a sermon from a man who would have described himself as an Apostle, I suppose, and who ridiculed in a gentle and mild way the idea that all men were to be partakers of the Gospel blessings which he seemed to think were the special property of what he called "The Church"; walked on to Lewisham, heard Morlais Jones: and then walked home in the moonlight, arriving here footsore and weary about 10.20 P.M. I enjoyed the day very much, all but the last four or five miles home at night. I am thankful to find myself so strong. I had a warm bath and slept like a top.'

Those who were privileged to entertain James Gilmour, if congenial, and the old friends who were fortunate enough to secure him for even a brief period, often experienced his power of vivid and entrancing narration. His twelve years of service had been very full of varied and uncommon experience, and when in the vein he could make the hours pass almost as minutes. 'During this furlough,' writes Dr. Reynolds, 'I had several opportunities of intercourse with him, and listened to several of his addresses on the progress and need of missionary enterprise in the north of China and Mongolia, and was profoundly impressed by his earnestness, but I was more deeply moved when in quiet tête-à-tête he unveiled some of his special experiences. I should like to mention one. He once had great hope of the conversion to God of a Mongol, who had given him his entire confidence, and who was suffering from cataract in both eyes. Gilmour felt that this was a case in which surgical help might restore the sufferer to at least partial sight, and he made arrangements that in the escort of a Mongol the patient should find his way to the medical institution at Peking. He started on the pilgrimage when Gilmour, with his brave young wife, were encamped in a great temporary settlement of Mongols, who were in a state of considerable fanatical excitement against the new faith and its foreign teacher. Gilmour said, "We prayed night and day for the success of this experiment, and we arranged to cover all expenses connected with the arrangement." Alas! wind laden with dust, and blinding heat and other apparent accidents conspired against the poor sufferer, and when the necessary time had elapsed after the operation and the bandages were removed, the patient was found to be stone blind. The Mongol companion stirred up the poor fellow's suspicion by telling him that he knew why the Missionary had sent him to Peking. "I saw," said he, "the jewel of your eye in a bottle on the shelf. These Christians can get hundreds of taels for these jewels which they take out of our eyes."

'When the blind man was brought back to Gilmour, his companion spread his suspicions and exasperating story in the entire district, and the fanatical hatred was augmented into seething and murderous passion, and our dear friends were in imminent peril for several weeks. If they had ventured to escape, it would have been a confession of a vile conspiracy with the Peking doctors, and a signal for their massacre. They remained to live down the ominous and odious charge, and in continuous effort to justify the simplicity of their motives and the purity and beneficence of their mission.

'Deeply moved, as I was, by the story of this hairbreadth escape, I asked Mrs. Gilmour more about those fearful weeks of suspense, and she assured me that they had been perfectly calm, and that they were entirely resigned to God's will, whatever it might be.'

'Many other trials of faith and patience were described by Gilmour, without one touch of self-approval or self-admiration, and the only trouble that haunted him was that the results of his long journeys and of his various missionary enterprises had been apparently so few.'

It was certain that James Gilmour's power as a speaker would be utilised for the great event of the London Missionary Society's year, the annual meeting at Exeter Hall. This fell, in 1883, on May 10, and he was the last speaker. This involved waiting about two hours and a half for his speech, and corresponding exhaustion on the part of the audience. But none who were present will forget the rapid way in which he secured the attention of his hearers, and the ease with which he held it to the close. He chose to speak of work in China, rather than in Mongolia; the recent publication of his book helping among other reasons to determine this choice. Part of the speech deserves reproduction here, because it outlines very sharply the work that engaged much of his time while resident in Peking, and because nowhere else can such a realistic, sparkling, and lifelike picture of the preaching work of the Peking mission, and consequently more or less of all preaching in great Chinese cities, be found.