President: Rev. J. K. McLean, D. D. Vice-presidents: Rev. A. L. Stone, D. D., Thomas C. Wedderspoon, Esq., Rev. T. K. Noble, Hon. F. F. Low, Rev. I. E. Dwinell, D. D., Hon. Samuel Cross, Rev. S. H. Willey, D. D., Edward P. Flint, Esq., Rev. J. W. Hough, D. D., Jacob S. Taber, Esq.
Directors: Rev. George Mooar, D. D., Hon. E. D. Sawyer, Rev. E. P. Baker, James M. Haven Esq., Rev. Joseph Rowell, Rev. John Kimball, E. P. Sanford, Esq.
Secretary: Rev. W. C. Pond. Treasurer: E. Palache, Esq.
THE BEGINNING OF HARVEST—ONG LUNE.
REV. WM. C. POND, SAN FRANCISCO.
Our Lord has begun—sooner than we desired and very suddenly to us—to gather from our harvest field His wheat into His garner. The first-fruits went home on Sunday, Aug. 3d, at our Bethany church. I was in the act of baptizing and welcoming to Christian fellowship on earth four of our more recently converted Chinese brethren, when our brother Ong Lune was welcomed to the fellowship above. He was a young man of 21 years, had been a Christian, as we hoped, for nearly three years, and a church member since December, 1877. His sickness was brief, and he was supposed to be recovering till about twenty-four hours before his death. He had greatly desired to become strong enough to be present at our August communion, but, instead, he ate bread in the kingdom of God.
Modest and unassuming, but intelligent, earnest and thoroughly consecrated to Christ, his absence from our mission work makes a void not easily filled. A great majority of American Christians might well have sat at the feet of this young Chinaman and learned how to be co-workers with the Saviour. Approaching his countrymen with a smile, seizing every opportunity to “speak a word in season,” he sought to bring them to our schools, and then to lead them to his Saviour. A house-servant, with little time that he could call his own, he will wear no starless crown. I know not how many times the question, “Who told you to come to school?” has been answered by the utterance of his name. The last service he was able to render was—in spite of pain and weariness from the disease which afterwards proved fatal—to act as my interpreter in the examination of three candidates for baptism, one of them, possibly, his own child in the Gospel.
His teacher—Miss Florence N. Wooley—quotes him as saying that what he wanted was “to bring more and more scholars, and watch them, and when they know about Jesus, must make them to be our brethren and try to keep them from temptation; and I wish to do the best I can, but am afraid of temptation myself.” She adds: “He succeeded in this; and the secret of his success, as told me by one of the scholars, was this: ‘He talked so nice to the boys, and never got cross nor angry; and so they all minded what he told them.’ He had entered into the spirit of the word, ‘Go out into the highways and hedges and compel them to come in.’ As soon as he came into school he was wont to speak of some one who had promised him to come that night. If this promise was not fulfilled, he went after the person again and again and brought him in. He was getting on well in his studies, especially in his study of the Bible. The last verses he recited were Acts vii. 54, 55, now happily fulfilled in his own experience.”