Rev. W. C. Pond, Superintendent.
HUMBLINGS.
BY REV. W. C. POND.
I had finished the preparation of the last annual report of our Mission. I had read it at the annual meeting. It was ready for the printer, and had even been placed in his hands. It was a report instinct throughout with good cheer. It could not be otherwise. It recorded the work of a prosperous year. No previous year of our whole history had approached this one, as to the numbers gathered into our schools and brought within reach of the invitations of the Gospel. Perhaps I was in danger of being “exalted above measure.” And, so, humblings were prepared for me.
It may be the dictate of expediency, but certainly it is not that of frankness and honesty, to speak to our benefactors only smooth things. There are shades as well as lights in missionary work. The tide is not always rising. The sun is not always at noon. And if possible, those who sustain the work ought to be made able to see the shadows and to understand the disappointments; ought to be admitted to acquaintanceship with even the mistakes which we, the workers, make. Daylight throughout our operations is essential. Without this, there are bred “bureau distempers,” petty falsities, self-seekings and the whole brood of faults into which even renewed natures get sometimes betrayed. One of the chief beauties and glories of the statements presented this year, both at Portland and at Cleveland, was their manifest frankness—the pains evidently taken to set before the people all the facts so far as the opportunity allowed.
But I am making a long preface. “What humblings have been prepared for you?” my readers are asking. One of our Chinese brethren, converted as we believed, and baptised some years ago—a young man in some respects specially capable and specially pleasing, who knows the way of life well, and can explain it clearly to his less instructed countrymen, is found to have been gambling on (for them) a large scale, and, at first, with rare success. Rumor has it that not less than $3,000 had flowed from the depleted purses of his countrymen into his own; but that blind to the fact that the tide might turn, he had continued his sin until it left him stranded and wrecked. Inquiry shows this rumor to be founded on facts. We are made to blush at the congratulations the heathen Chinese have been proffering over the good-luck of the gambling Christian. We get the heart-ache as we see how sin breeds sin, how falsehood and profanity follow in the train of these dishonest gains. The heart-ache deepens as we see some others of our brethren swept away by sympathy or friendship, or possibly by some less amiable consideration into partial complicity with his wrong. It transpires that with several others as with this brother, there has been a forgetfulness of the assembling of themselves together, a self-assertion and self-trust, a disposition to debate but not to pray, a cooling of brotherly love and Christian zeal, all of which fore-shadowed like dishonors to be heaped upon the name of Christ, unless a breath of God’s dear spirit should soon inspire in them a freshened life.
Thank God, these humblings have not come alone. If the great body of our Chinese Christians had been insensible to them, if there had been no movement, or if only a ripple on the surface of an otherwise stagnant sentiment, I should have been discouraged indeed. But there was an immediate movement, a deep sense of shame, an almost too speedy discipline. And now, taking counsel together, we have undertaken, with the help of God, to withstand more faithfully those beginnings of evil; to make the first symptoms of coldness and inattention and wandering the signal for more earnest prayer and for kindly and cautious, but effective, watch and care.
In connection with this our schools in San Francisco propose to undertake something more general and more generous in the way of giving. Certainly the sum total of expenditures made by our Chinese brethren, in connection with their Christian work, is creditable already. When we consider their circumstances it is not a little thing that in this last year their offerings, one way and another, should reach a total of $2,000. But a scrutiny of the sources from which this amount had come showed that in some quarters the grace of giving had not been as generally cultivated or as fruitful in results as it might have been. And a recovery of lost ground in this regard, an advance beyond anything heretofore attempted is fully resolved upon. Plans are being laid, the mutual exhortations have begun, and it is believed that by the 1st of December they will show us definite and practical returns. One of the helpers writes me as follows: “Last night I have been spoken to the scholars and brethren about the gifts of the money for the missionary work and about the gas that you are going to put up instead of the oil lamps. They were so pleased to help. I can hardly know how to tell you how glad they feel to pay the gas and water bills and to help you pay the rent. I was surprised that I should receive a large sum of gifts last evening so soon as when I get through my sayings, and I expect another sum this evening, because great many have not any money with them last evening.” This same good spirit seems to pervade all the schools and I am greatly comforted by it.
Other encouragements are not wanting. Even now I am awaiting in my study the arrival of five Chinese who, with the approval and recommendation of our brethren, offer themselves as candidates for baptism and reception to our Bethany Church. Scarcely a month has passed without tidings of some one turning to the light and avowing himself a disciple of Christ. But I have been made specially glad this month by the news from two of our youngest and smallest schools. Mrs. Willett, of Santa Cruz, reporting for the first time two of her pupils as giving evidence of conversion, adds: “I am very hopeful concerning the spiritual interests of four of my boys. Eight of them already own and study the New Testament. I give them Bible instruction two whole evenings each week, and they enjoy it.” And Miss Fulton, of Berkeley says: “In reporting that two of the pupils give evidence of conversion, I do not say that they have confessed it by word; but they attend so regularly to school, and to Sunday school, listen to all religious instruction so earnestly, and join in the Lord’s Prayer so heartily, that I feel assured they are earnestly seeking the truth.”