The Christian Church in Persia to-day.
It is a beautiful picture, and one full of hope, that remains with us as we leave the sad, inert, decadent land of Persia. There among a people, sinful, sensuous, corrupt, and apparently loveless, at almost every place where in school or hospital, in gaudy harem or in humble cottage, the Gospel of purity and love is preached to-day, are little companies of Persian Christians, men and women who, disowned, impoverished, persecuted, in peril of imprisonment and death, count it a joy to suffer for Christ's sake. Truly in Persia are heroic outposts of the Christian Church.
Ion Keith-Falconer and Arabia.
We close this chapter with a short picture of one of the noble men who have given their lives to win the way into Arabia.
'See, in the purpose of God for Arabia, that lad of promise, lovable, thoughtful, strong in mind and body, in his noble Scottish home. See him at Harrow, then at Cambridge, rising above his fellows, many-sided, full of fire and life. Watch him at work, passing rapidly from form to form at Harrow, taking a first in one Tripos and then another at Cambridge, good at mathematics, brilliant at languages, a born teacher, so exact in his working that he masters Dutch Grammar in three weeks rather than leave a book in that language, which bore upon a lecture, unread. Watch him at play—bicycling from John o' Groats to Land's End, and winning the Bicycling Championship of England, a man of superb physique and training, "as hard as nails." Watch him at his special hobby—shorthand, an expert verbatim reporter, the chosen writer on phonography in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Down in the slums of Cambridge, or in the East End of London, you may find him too, now raising, or himself giving, funds for some enterprise, now addressing a great meeting, now sitting beside a man who seeks a way to Christ.
'For Ion Keith-Falconer is more than student and athlete—beyond the power of brain and muscle there lies a heart which beats true to its Master, "fervent still after all the turmoil of a great Public School and the more subtle temptations of a great University."
Surely scholarship and Cambridge claim such a man as this? At nine-and-twenty we find him a learned professor in Cambridge, at thirty a missionary to Arabia, at thirty-one, only six months after he left England, we stand by his grave, the black mountainous rocks of Aden lie behind us, and the white sandy shore of Arabia edges the limitless stretch of the ocean beyond.
From one point of view, Keith-Falconer's missionary career was disastrous and a dislocation. From another, his going was the most natural thing in the world. Young, strong, free, a master of Arabic, he had the constraining love of Christ within him, and a vision of the Moslem world—especially Arabia—before. Speaking for the last time before he left Scotland, he said:
'"While vast continents are shrouded in almost utter darkness, and hundreds of millions suffer the horrors of heathenism, and of Islam, the burden of proof lies upon you to show that the circumstances in which God has placed you were meant by Him to keep you out of the foreign mission-field."
'The purpose of the strong man to spend and be spent in the Cause shines out in those last short months. We see him building at Sheikh Othman a centre for his work, talking with patients in the mat-verandah, dropping into coffee-shops to meet in friendly intercourse with the Moslems he loved, picking up and carrying with the aid of his devoted colleague a sick man left to die in the street. Then the fever-mists gather, and the scholar-missionary's death claims Arabia for her true Lord.