After his conversion and study a few years in the mission school at Marsovan, it was the privilege of the writer to spend some time in teaching in a small town. The Protestant people, whose children he taught, had no preacher and they urged him to preach for them. Not ability nor preparedness, but necessity, compelled him to engage in this double duty. One day he was asked by a man who belonged to the Armenian church, and whose brother (deceased then) was one of the first converts to Protestantism, whether he knew how the Protestant work began there. His reply was “No,” and what the man told him is something like the following:
The first Protestant brother who came to the town went to a coffee-house,[94] and took out his Bible and attempted to read it to the men there; but they refused to listen to him. He was so grieved that he burst into tears. This attracted the attention of an elderly man, well-known in the town as “Uncle Toros.” He came to him and asked what was the matter. He answered that he would like to read the Bible and speak to them about the wonderful love of God, but they objected to his so doing. Uncle Toros was much interested in the earnestness of the man and his plans, and, being very hospitable, on learning that he was a stranger in the town invited him to his own house. According to the custom of the country everybody that is able has a guest-chamber for guests. Uncle Toros also was a very influential man in the town and he had many friends and relatives, who with the neighbors used to come to his sitting-room and spend the early part of every night.
Thus our brother had a good audience every evening to whom he could read and expound the Bible. No one could insult or molest him—he was Uncle Toros’ guest. This was the beginning of the work at Zara, about thirty miles northeast of Sivas, and when the writer was there, nearly fifteen years later, he found about twenty families composing the Protestant community.
The “two-edged sword” of the Spirit, “the Word of God” on the one hand and “the young converts, full of faith and of the Holy Ghost” on the other hand, have been still going about “lighting the torch of truth and salvation throughout the land” and have thus wrought this marvelous reformation which until within a short time has been progressing rapidly. The Turkish government is trying a plan, which the Roman emperors tried in the early Christian centuries, namely to destroy the Christians and Christianity in the empire.
The following instance combines three phases in one, to wit: the mighty power of the word of God, heroism of those who believe in the power of that Word and the violation of all promises of religious freedom, the marked cruelty and perversion of justice of the Turkish officials.
Avedis (good news) Zotian was a boy of ten or twelve years of age when the writer was acquainted with him, over forty years ago. He was quiet, unassuming, skillful and industrious and was engaged in his father’s trade, copper-smithing. Through his cousin, who was a constant reader of the Bible and a friend of the writer, and still better a warm friend of the reformation, Avedis was brought under the influence of the Word of God. He finally, about 1885, avowed himself a Protestant and joined that community. He became very active, and, like the prophet Jeremiah, felt that “His word was in his heart as a burning fire.” He had a long distance to go to the services and would not be able to stop on his way and speak to others on the topic of religion. He, therefore, thought one Sunday in 1889 to have a verse on a piece of board and to carry it along so that the people could see and read it. The words from Matt. 4:17, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand,” were written in the Armenian, and Avedis had his friend Sahag, another Protestant Armenian, to write the same in the Turkish language. Avedis started to church with the above text. He was arrested on his way by the Turkish officers and thrown into prison. His friend Sahag also was arrested for his share of the crime and shared the corner of the prison with Avedis. The charge against these young men was that they were political agitators.
After several months’ imprisonment the unrighteous judge declared them guilty and sentenced them to be exiled for life. They, with tearful eyes, bade adieu to their friends, relatives, brothers, sisters, aged parents, and to their newly married wives, who in vain had tried to wipe away their overflowing tears. They were driven like cattle by the mounted officers to Smyrna, then sent to Africa. They were so cruelly ill-treated on their way that, not very long after their exile, Avedis was taken away by his Heavenly Father to rest from his labors. And what became of Sahag no one knows. The Turkish government’s early determination to root out the Christians and Christianity from the empire lacks no evidences. Only the selfish European powers, the guardians of the Christian subjects of the Porte, were unwilling to see them.
2. EDUCATION. Next in importance to the Bible and the activity of the natives in spreading it, the superiority of the educational institutions of the mission and the love for the truth in the native youth will claim our attention, as potent factors in the progress of this reformation.
Since the entrance of the Turks into Western Asia the ancient centers of learning have been lying in ruins; the photophobic malady of Mohammedanism and its fanatic devotees had extinguished the numerous lights which have been burning for centuries on the altars of learning. These wild beasts of mankind had broken in upon these countries, once so glorious and famous for their happy estate of civilization and culture, who had given religion and laws to the world, but now, through ignorance, superstition, and vice had become the most deplorable spectacle of extreme misery. The barbarous tyrants—the sultans of the Ottoman empire—who gloried in cruelty and aimed only at the height of greatness through sensuality, had reduced so great and goodly a part of the world to that lamentable distress and servitude under which it now faints and groans. “The true religion discountenanced and oppressed (insulted); no light of learning permitted, nor virtue cherished, violence and rapine exulting over all and leaving no security, save to an abject mind and unlooked-on poverty.”
The above description of an eye-witness was uttered two centuries before the coming of the missionaries, who have found it literally true when they came into the East. They also found in this unhappy empire “a noble race”—the Armenians—“the Anglo-Saxons of the East,” whose “standard of moral purity is also said to be immeasurably above that of the Turks around them, and they have a conscience which can be touched and roused.” Their higher standard of moral purity and superior intelligence are due to their religion—Christianity—and to their better education. For as far back as the middle of the seventeenth century, the Armenian press was in full activity in Constantinople.