THE LIFE STORY OF PASTOR WANG
IF Pastor Hsi may be spoken of as the Paul of the Shansi Church, Barnabas finds his counterpart in Pastor Wang of Hwochow.
Though possessing none of the peculiar gifts which made Hsi a leader amongst foreigners and Chinese, he has exercised a remarkable personal influence upon hundreds of lives, winning by consistency and sincerity those with whom he has come in contact. On our first arrival we found him already in charge, conducting the Sunday services and generally caring for the Church members.
His unfailing courtesy, consideration, and tact simplified many difficult situations, and the exercise of his natural gift for gathering people around him and drawing out the best in them soon resulted in a rapidly growing work. He was almost immediately chosen as Deacon, and before long the office of Elder was given to him. All turned to Mr. Wang in difficulty, sought his advice in perplexity, and by the unanimous desire of the Church he was in 1909 ordained Pastor at Hwochow.
He has developed his gifts in the school of adversity, for trouble overtook him in his childhood when his father died only a few years before the great famine which was to sweep over the province of Shansi. Poor they always were, and his love for his mother was intensified as he saw the self-sacrificing devotion with which she earned enough by her spinning to enable him to continue his schooling. At the age of fifteen he was married, and on the bride's arrival the falsity of the middleman through whom the engagement had been long ago contracted was revealed, for the bride was a helpless cripple and a serious burden on the already overpressed household.
Food soon began to be scarce, for the rains failed and the prospect of the wheat harvest was poor. They endured and hoped, being mercifully saved from the knowledge that they must now enter upon a period when the inhabitants of Shansi should touch the depths of human suffering and call on death to end their woes. No pen can fully describe the horrors of that time. When summer and autumn crops had failed the rains were still withheld, and despair seized on all as they saw the impossibility of sowing the wheat for next year's harvest.
The delicate bride, unable to withstand the privations of that time, soon died, and Wang's sister was married, so that he and his mother remained alone to care for each other. The poor young sister lived but a very short while in her new home, and the circumstances of her death were so tragic that Wang felt unable to forgive the man who had been her husband. After many years, when circumstances brought this man to his home, he realised that Christ's command to forgive those who have offended against you required of him a complete change of feeling towards this once hated brother-in-law, and he invited him to share his food as a sign of forgiveness and reconciliation.
Every month the distress became more acute; weeds, leaves, bark of trees, and even some softer kinds of wood were used as food, but numbers were dying and of the one hundred and twenty families which inhabited the village, at last thirty only remained. The dead outnumbered the living, and compelled by hunger the latter were driven to sustain life by feeding on the former.
Wang saw his mother's vain endeavour to supply some kind of food on which they might subsist, and his heart was torn to see her deprive herself even now that there might be more for him.
When the famine was at its worst, the most tragic blow fell. His mother one day told him it was her wish that he should accompany several neighbours to a near village where lived a relation. In those days none dared to travel alone, lest in their weak, half-starved condition they should fall a prey to man or beast. The pretext given was the possibility of obtaining the loan of a little grain from the aunt who lived there. Beggars were many and givers few, and he wondered at his mother entertaining any hope of such good fortune.