Many times during those days as I witnessed the Holy Spirit working in the hearts of these men and women and saw signs of the light of the Gospel beginning to spread throughout that whole region I thought of that first little seed of truth sown in the heart of the poor suffering woman as she lay in the women's hospital in Changte.
SKETCH XII
Our First Woman Convert
Our First Woman Convert
A Mere Memory.
The following is but a brief memory of the long gone past. Even the name of the woman is forgotten but not the look on her pale patient face as she lay for weeks in the Mission Hospital—our first woman in-patient. Though almost thirty years have come and gone since those earliest days in North Honan the memory of this woman remains as one of the very few bright gleams in what was to us pioneer missionaries a time of darkness and peril.
The people were still bitter against us though a year had passed since a foothold had been gained in what we had so long looked forward to as our "Promised Land." Stories of the vilest nature widely circulated and believed did much to hinder the progress of the Gospel, and make the people fear and hate us. They believed we were capable of the very worst atrocities. Were I to attempt the plain record of many of these stories British law would forbid the publication.
It is little wonder, therefore, that our good doctor, a man of exceptional ability who had left brilliant prospects behind to come to China, chafed under the petty cases which came to the Hospital, and had more than once openly expressed his wish for some "good cases" which would help to open the people's hearts towards us. Before long his wish was abundantly gratified for three years later that hospital recorded twenty-eight thousand treatments in one year, a goodly proportion being "good" cases.
The beginning of the breaking of the ice of prejudice came when one day a man wheeled into the hospital yard a barrow on which lay his sick wife. He seemed very loath to come but his poor wife appeared past feeling. It was most evident that only the hope of relief from otherwise certain death could have induced them to risk coming for help to the foreign doctor.
A little later the doctor announced a serious operation imperative. To this the woman gave her consent but the man hesitated. How impossible it is for those brought up in a Western land to form any conception of the struggle the man went through in face of such a sweeping away of life-long prejudices, but at last in face of that great enemy, Death, he yielded.