Hymnbooks and singing.
Korean boys are not the only ones who treasure the hymnbook and love to learn and to sing Christian hymns. The missionary who can play and sing, and the one who knows enough about music to translate hymns and adapt tunes, has marvelous opportunities to work effectively among children. Miss Ford’s experiences in Palestine illustrate the truth of this:—
“I should like to say a word about the use of the organ. We are able sometimes to have very large Moslem audiences in the villages. Scores of boys will gather around to hear. When we propose to teach them a hymn or chorus they eagerly agree to learn. The subject of the song is always salvation in Jesus Christ, and the way of life is pointed out. We often hear the children afterward singing these hymns in the streets.... God has given us large numbers of little children to bring to Him. They learn hymns and psalms, chapters of the Gospels, and verses from the Bible with great facility, and they love to sing the hymns. Now also we can use with profit, large, illustrated, highly colored pictures of the life and teachings of our Lord, as well as Old Testament stories.”[92]
Obstacles to bringing children to Christ.
Lest anyone be tempted to think that the work is always easy, that one has but to sow the seed in order without further work and prayer to reap a bountiful harvest, it is but fair to mention a few of the obstacles that missionaries must constantly meet while trying to win children to Christ. Heredity, age-long custom, superstition, fatalism, the shackles of caste and prejudice, the home influences that so quickly counteract what a child learns during a few brief hours at a mission compound,—all these and many other hindrances must be reckoned with and overcome. Miss Carmichael graphically describes some of these experiences of effort and disappointment in India.
Miss Carmichael on discouragements in India.
“Often we hear people say how excellent it is, and how they never worship idols now, but only the true God; and even a heathen mother will make her child repeat its texts to you, and a father will tell you how it tells him Bible stories; and, if you are quite new to the work, you put it in the Magazine, and at home it sounds like conversion. All this goes on most peacefully; there is not the slightest stir, till something happens to show the people that the doctrine is not just a creed, but contains a living Power. And then, and not until then, there is opposition. In one village there was a little Brahmin child who often tried to speak to us, but was never allowed. One day she risked capture and its consequences, and ran across the narrow stream which divides the Brahmin street from the village, and spoke to one of our band in a hurried little whisper, ‘Oh, I do want to hear about Jesus!’ And she told how she had learned at school in her own town, and then she had been sent to her mother-in-law’s house in this jungle village, ‘that one,’ pointing to a house where they never had smiles for us; but her mother-in-law objected to the preaching, and had threatened to throw her down the well if she listened to us. Just then a hard voice called her and she flew. Next time we went to that village she was shut up somewhere inside.”[93]
“After many days.”
Sometimes God grants that bread cast on the waters with loving, lavish hand, is found again after many, many days. Often a Bible verse or the words of a hymn, or the recollection of what was seen and heard in a missionary home, has not been forgotten, and has borne fruit in after life. “A rich Japanese silk merchant sent for the missionaries in his town, and entertained them most hospitably. He told how as a child he had attended a Sunday-School. ‘Very often,’ he said, ‘right in the midst of my business the words of the hymn, “Jesus loves me, this I know,” come to me, and, try as I may, I can’t get them out of my mind.’ He then repeated the hymn from beginning to end, and added, ‘Though I have lived my life without religion, I feel that it is the most important thing there is, and I want my little girl to be a Christian; and it is for that purpose,’ he added emphatically, ‘that I have placed her in the mission school, that she may become a Christian.’”
Ours is the greater privilege.