A copy of the Book of the Acts fell into the hands of a Korean, whose heart was touched by the truths. He gathered his villagers together and taught them its contents and they sent for missionaries to come to them. It was impossible for them to go at once, but they sent copies of the Gospels. The eager Koreans read and studied as well as they could alone, and noticing that some “washing rite” was enjoined upon the believers in the Jesus doctrine, they met to discuss how they should follow it out and thus fulfil all righteousness. They prayed over it for a time, and at last decided that each should go to his own home and reverently should wash himself in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. (Text.)
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BARBARISM
The missionaries to the Dyaks of Borneo, in making their calls not infrequently are seated in a position of honor in a native hut underneath a huge cluster of skulls, the war trophy of the head-hunting Dyaks. Rev. H. L. E. Luering writes in the London Christian that the natives believe that the courage of the slain enemy enters his victor’s soul if the head of the dead man is in his possession. So the heads are cut off and placed in loose rattan receptacles and smoked over a slow fire, and polished and strung up like great bunches of grapes, and guarded with a jealousy greater than is accorded any other possession. They represent just so much of the owner’s self—his own soul—and to lose a head would deprive him of just so much strength and courage.
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The late Bishop Taylor, of Africa, narrated the following in the Missionary Review of the World:
I saw a woman who had been accused of witchcraft and condemned to death by exposure to ferocious ants. She was bound to a big ant-hill ten or fifteen feet high. The victim usually dies in two days, but this woman endured it for five days and was then driven away because “she was too hard to kill.” She crawled in a terrible condition to the mission station—the most pitiful sight the missionary had ever beheld. After months of careful nursing she recovered, and this woman, so terribly scarred and disfigured, was converted at one of my meetings.
(188)
See [Cruel Greed].