Among the Syrians a hold was obtained in spite of the intense opposition of the Roman Catholics who claimed all Syrians as belonging to them. The severest opposition during the first twenty-five years of mission effort in Turkey came not from the Turks but from the Roman Catholics, who did not stop at the employment of any measure which would tend to banish the printing-press and curtail the work of the Protestant missionaries.
The Mohammedans commanded early attention. They were drawn to the missionaries by the fact that no pictures or images were used in Protestant worship nor gaudy display made in any public services. Repeatedly Turks said to the missionaries, “You are like us, you are good Moslems.” As acquaintance increased, interest deepened in this dominant race. Conditions were such that little directly aggressive effort could be wisely made for their immediate enlightenment. Much was done in the way of private conversation and through the preparation and publication of a Christian literature adapted to their needs.
It may be said, however, that the Armenians most completely commanded both the interest of the missionaries and the attention of the constituency at home. The most of the stations in the country were established especially for this race. They were found at every center. Even in Syria and in all of the interior stations, Armenians and Turks were the chief people with whom the missionaries constantly came in contact. Interest in Armenians was strengthened by the intense persecutions through which the evangelicals passed in the early ’40s, at the hand of their own ecclesiastics. They were open-minded, able, and devout, and presented a wide opportunity for sowing the seeds of intelligent belief. At that time little had been done for the Bulgarians in European Turkey and Macedonia. The more remote Asiatic field had proved to be so large and so interesting that there had been scant pause to look into the conditions and needs of the people so near at hand, occupying the southeastern corner of Europe.
Levi Parsons and Pliny Fisk, writing from Smyrna to the Board rooms in February, 1820, said, “In all the populous Catholic and Mohammedan countries on the north and south side of the Mediterranean there is not a single Protestant missionary. In all the Turkish empire, containing perhaps twenty million souls, not one missionary station is permanently occupied and but a single missionary besides ourselves.” This one man did not long remain. Besides the English work among the Jews and Turks in Constantinople and Palestine, the evangelization of the Turkish empire was left from the first to the American Board. In later years the Disciples of Christ and the Seventh Day Adventists have sent a few missionaries into the country, but their work has been almost exclusively among the Protestants and has resulted only in dividing churches already organized. The Church Missionary Society of England has had some work in Bagdad, and a Scotch society in Aden and the Reformed Church of the United States has recently begun operations upon the southern coast of Arabia. With a few other minor exceptions, the Turkish empire north of Syria has been generally conceded to be the distinctive mission field of the American Board of Missions.
When the division of fields took place in 1870 between the American Board and the newly organized Presbyterian Board of Missions, southern Syria and Persia were assigned to that Board, while the American Board retained northern Syria and all the rest of Turkey. In European Turkey the same Board is in sole charge of all the evangelical work for and among the Bulgarians south of the Balkans, the Methodist Episcopal Board of the United States having a work among the same people north of the Balkans. Thus Macedonia and Bulgaria south of the Balkans, Asia Minor, Armenia, Koordistan, northern Syria and northern Mesopotamia are left the sole field of the American Board, with the few exceptions mentioned above. This has put upon it a responsibility and placed before it an opportunity such as few mission agencies in modern times have had to face.
XIV. BEGINNINGS IN REFORM
I had occasion some years ago to visit a considerable part of Turkey, from Constantinople and Beirut to Mosul and Bagdad, and everywhere I paid particular attention to missionary conditions and the influence of mission work upon the people. This is a land assigned almost wholly to American Missionary Boards, and the influence is everywhere marked and excellent. The late Premier Stviloff told me in Sofia that but for young men educated by American teachers in Constantinople, Bulgaria when it became independent would have had to depend on Russians for administrative officers. He was himself, like so many other distinguished Bulgarians, a graduate of Robert College. In Syria a native physician, graduated at the Syrian Protestant College, said to me, “We say, ‘After God, van Dyke.’” In the interior cities, such as Marash, Aintab, Urfa, Mardin and Diarbekr, the American schools and the large self-supporting churches were evidences of the new evangelic spirit and culture which had put new heart into those ancient seats of intellectual decay. About Harpoot there were thousands who had learned English, and hundreds have come from there to this country believing it to be a very paradise. The contrast was sad enough when I came into the towns south from Mosul where American missionary influence had not reached, and scarce any signs of intellectual or material improvement were to be found. I am convinced that the work of devoted, intelligent, broad-minded missionaries is far more effective in lifting a people out of ignorance and social decay into enlightened civilization, than all the influences of commerce or mere governmental policy. Our missionaries bring the motive of faith as the example of unselfish service which nothing else can supply.
—William Hayes Ward, LL. D.,
Editor “New York Independent.”