“What wilt thou that I shall do unto thee?” asked the Lord of the World of the blind beggar.
And he said, “Lord that I may receive my sight.”
Those who charge themselves with the care of the blind may not give so royally now. Theirs is the harder part, they tend and care with unfailing patience, untiring diligence, and then they stand, and wait.
I was so lost in my admiration for the Mission to the Blind, that I began to think and to say, that missionary enterprise, which I had always thought should turn its attention to its own people, was at least justified in this land of China, where no provision was made for the sick and afflicted, and where charity was unknown. I said it very often, and every foreigner approved, until at last, there came one or two who promptly showed me the utter folly of drawing deductions when I didn't know anything about the facts.
The foreigner in China is divided into two camps. He is either missionary or he is anti-missionary. Both sides are keen on the matter. And, of course, there are always two sides to every question, as the little girl saw whose sympathies went out to the poor lion, who hadn't got a Christian.
China needs medical missionaries, needs them as badly as the city slums of London or New York; and China is going to get them, for there are thousands of people who think a deal more of the state of the soul of the materialistic Chinaman than they do of the starving bodies, and more than starved intellects of the slum children of a Christian land. Formerly the missionary had a worse time than he has now. He came among a people who despised him, and more than once he suffered martyrdom, and even when there was no question of martyrdom, some of the regulations he submitted to must have been unpleasant. Unwisely I think, for you can never make a European look like a Chinaman, the powers that ran the missionary societies, decided that the missionary must wear Chinese dress, even to the shaven head and the queue behind. A hatchet-faced Scot with a fiery red pigtail, they say was an awesome sight, certainly calculated to impress the Celestial, though whether in the way the newcomer intended I should not like to say. The growing of a proper queue was, of course, a question of months, and the majority of missionaries began their career with a false one. A story is told of one luckless young man in Shanghai who lost his, and went about his business for some little time unaware of the fact. When he did discover his loss he went back on his tracks, searching for it at all the places he had visited. At last he arrived at the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, and there, pinned high on the wall, was his missing property, and attached to it by some facetious clerk was the legend in great letters that all might read: “Deposits of one tael not accepted here!” For the benefit of the uninitiated, one tael is a sum of money, varying with the price of silver, from half-a-crown to three shillings.
But those days are gone by. Nowadays missionary societies are wiser, and the medical missionaries are pleasant, cheerful, hard-working men and women doing an immense amount of good among the suffering poor, so kindly, so thoughtful are they that I grudge their services to the heathen when I think how many of the children, aye and those who are not children, in the mean streets of the great cities of the West need their services. They trouble themselves about the souls of the people too, and the example of kindly lives must be good. Again I grudge it all to the Oriental, though I have come to realise that there are many ways of doing good in the world. I do occasionally feel that the missionaries are a little too strenuous in inculcating prayer and praise, and exhorting to a virtue that is a little beyond the average mortal. The caring for both bodies and souls can certainly be overdone. However I dare say it all works right in the end, and I, who do nothing, should be the last to judge. Still sometimes I could not but remember the picture of the two babies discussing the situation, the fat, plump baby, and the thin, miserable, scrawny one.