THE ROMANCE OF MISSIONS.
BY REV. W. C. POND, SAN FRANCISCO.
It is said that in connection with a somewhat enthusiastic collection for the American Board, taken ten years or more ago, at the First Congregational Church in this city, one card was sent up having this inscription: “Five dollars for Home missions, but ‘nary red’ for Foreign.” The Christian spirit of the expression and its rhetorical elegance are about equal. Yet it well represents one class of Christian workers and givers who believe intensely that charity begins at home, who like to see what they are doing, and to watch its on-goings and to judge of its results for themselves. Foreign missions seem to them chimerical; the interest in such work romantic; and they don’t believe in romance and chimeras.
We have sometimes met another class whose interest flags when they are brought in contact with the hard facts of any Christian work. For them, “’Tis distance lends enchantment to the view.” To see and handle any Christian enterprise involves them inevitably in disappointment. They read the glowing pages of the Herald, and often feel their hearts burn within them; but if brought into actual, daily contact with the toils, the drudgeries of service, the days of small things, the months and years of discouragement through which, with faith that would not falter, God led his servants on to that which now makes those pages glow, they would soon become disheartened, possibly fault-finding, as though funds and men were being wasted on a work that makes so little show.
We respectfully suggest to all such friends of our Chinese work that they remain in the East, and do not at present visit California; for Christ, as found in the souls for whom we labor, has no halo round his head—indeed, He had none when He wrought in that carpenter’s shop at Nazareth; when He walked, with dust-worn raiment and with weary feet, the ill-wrought trails of ancient Palestine; nor even when He hung upon the cross. There was no external beauty to make men desire him; and to many who at this distance are almost filled with envy at the high privileges Peter, James and John enjoyed of seeing his face and hearing his voice, and walking in his companionship, He might have seemed a “root out of dry ground, having no form nor comeliness.”
At any rate, He abides to-day in souls that are very dark, that are very little sanctified—saints that by no means answer to the ideal saintliness—He abides in them; and while with patient love we bear with them, and while we hope on and work on, though faith feels like fainting and hope seems long deferred, we are assured that we are serving Him. “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”
This is the period of the year when our work has least of what is outward and visible to stir enthusiasm. The weather is often stormy. The nights are often very dark. At some of the factories, work having broken across the boundary line which fading daylight fixed, holds on under gas-light till it is too late for our pupils to get to school. At any rate, many of them drop off; the average declines, and our hearts droop a little. It would be so much easier to work, if we could all the time be expanding, increasing, harvesting. Then, often, the pupils seem specially dull, and this one or that one in whom we have become deeply interested, and whom we supposed to have become somewhat enlightened, discloses a depth of darkness which we do not like to fathom, and shows that he has understood far less than we supposed. Among those whom we believe to be true followers of Christ, there crop out littlenesses of envy or jealousy or ill-humor, that perhaps would call down on them swift condemnation, did not all this remind us so much of what has stained our own Christian life.
Now if our romantic friends should drop in upon us at such times, they might be sorely disappointed; might feel that we had drawn on our fancies for some of our facts; might possibly go away and add their own “Amen” to the scornful taunts of Godless newspapers upon “converted Chinamen.” And yet just such experiences of difficulty and discouragement belong to Christian work everywhere. If they do not form a necessary part of the discipline and training of the church, they certainly are unavoidable in the healing of sin-poisoned souls—in the education, the leading out of men from darkness into light.
I write these things, not because I have any special disappointments to communicate. I have none. And yet the state of the work just now is shadowed in these reflections. I have sometimes fancied—and felt that it was no mere fancy—that I could see in the story of our little mission, a tiny miniature of the history of the Apostolic Church. We had our little Pentecost to start with. We had the glow of a new love, the effervescence of a new life, the fresh joy of fraternal fellowship; prayer meetings carried, against my protest, for sheer delight in them, on into the small hours, by men who must be up and hard at work by six o’clock in the morning. Then after awhile we had our Ananias—two of them, since there was no wife to match Sapphira. And then we had disputes and little jealousies, like those of the Grecians against the Hebrews, and our scatterings by persecution and by other causes, in which, I rejoice to say, our disciples, like those of old, went here and there, preaching the word; so that with all that there has been at times to start anxiety, to test faith, to chasten hope, the work has kept moving on. Souls have been added constantly, saved souls, we trust. Much prayer has gone up to the throne of grace, and earnest work has followed it, and Christ, thank God, has proved himself to be stronger than the strong man armed.