I have been thinking also how we should train our people in benevolence. We must train the children. I have a little girl, to whom I gave a red cent and wished to teach her something. So I asked her to what she would give it—to the sick, or for the preacher, or for sending missionaries? “What do they send missionaries for?” she asked. “To teach the people God’s Word who have not heard it,” I answered. “But what will one cent do?” she replied. Said I, “If one hundred little girls should give a cent each, it would make a dollar.” My little girl had learned to sing and play a little on the organ. When the young men came in, they would ask her to sing for them; but after this she would answer, “I will if you will give me a cent.” When she had laid by five cents, I asked her if she was going to buy candy or nuts with it. “No,” says she, “I am going to give this to Mr. Singing Walker, our missionary to the wild Indians.” This, it seems to me, shows the way we are to train up our people, beginning with the children.
THE CHINESE.
HOME-LOVE VERSUS CHRIST-LOVE.
To all persons familiar with missionary work in foreign lands the fact suggested by the title of this article is more or less familiar. It sometimes occurs, even in American families, that Christ enters “to set a man at variance against his father and even a daughter against her mother,” but this is unusual, so much so as to seem almost monstrous. When, as was the case last week, not far from my own field, the conversion of a daughter provokes the mother to disown her and to bid her leave home and look out for herself, we are set wondering what strange madness has wrecked that mother’s heart, and we ask, Is she possessed of the devil?
But this experience is usual in the turning of our Chinese to Christ. Scarcely any of them can escape it. And the questionings and struggles and sorrows are often very severe, and I have, of late, been specially impressed by them. Thus, Mrs. Shattuck, of Santa Barbara, writes: “We have three or four anxious to join the Association [thus making profession of faith in Christ—W. C. P.], but they are afraid of their own families. Tong is a good Christian boy,—as a pupil and as a singer equal to any China boy I ever had. When he talked with me he trembled like a leaf, saying, ‘I do so love your Jesus, but my family be angry. What shall I do?’”
Jee Gam has a little group of pupils in our Central school so eager to study the Bible that they often remain an extra hour (from 9:30 to 10:30 P. M.) for instruction from him. One in this group, as deeply interested and as intelligent and constant as any, is a brother to two of our Chinese brethren, but has never himself confessed Christ. Jee Gam wondered at this, and began to inquire into it closely. The young man replied, “My brothers are both Christians. I am the only one left to worship my mother when she dies. It would break her heart if she thought she had not even one son left to worship her.” I confess that as I “took in the situation” I felt the tears starting. What shall we say to such a soul? This led to an item in the experience of Jee Gam himself. “When I left home the last time,” he said, “my father, knowing that I had not joined him in the worship of ancestors, and knowing why I had not, walked with me outside the village, urging me to promise to worship him when he should die.” He appealed not only to Jee Gam’s affection but to his fears. “‘If you do not worship me,’ he said, ‘my ghost shall pursue you and punish you.’ I could not so pain him as to say that I would not worship him, and I could not say that I would worship him, and so, I said over and over again, ‘I will do what is right.’ And these were the last words I ever said to my father: ‘Father, I will do what is right.’”
A few days ago Rev. D. D. Jones, formerly laboring as a missionary in South China, was speaking to me of one of the members of our Church who succumbed to the pressure brought to bear upon him at his marriage in China, and bowed to the idols. Immediately afterwards, deeply penitent, he went to the chapel in some neighboring village, where Mr. Jones was just then preaching, and confessed his fault. “I was not afraid of what they threatened to do to me, but when they began to persecute my mother I could not bear it.”
The case which has most deeply interested me and called forth my earnest prayer is that of a Chinese physician in Marysville. I made his acquaintance about two weeks ago, on my recent visit to that mission. He has attended our school for more than a year, and is one of the most faithful of the pupils. He shrinks from no service by which he can help on the work. He is well read in Chinese—perhaps beyond any of our brethren, and is regarded as specially skillful as a surgeon after the Chinese ways. He is a very substantial looking man, with a fine head, a pleasant face, and a demeanor marked at once by modesty and strength. He is greatly interested in the study of the Bible, and, but for one hindrance, would doubtless be a member of the Association, and would, perhaps, have presented himself for baptism. I sat down by his side and asked him what he thought of Jesus. “I believe in Jesus Christ,” was his emphatic reply. “But how much do you believe in him?” I asked, and then proceeded to illustrate real faith by the confidence which he would wish his patients to repose in him—a confidence which would lead them to abide implicitly by all his directions. “I believe in Jesus Christ just as I would wish my patients to believe in me,” was his reply. “What, then, is in the way of your becoming an avowed and active Christian?” He turned to our helper, Loo Quong, and talked to him at length in Chinese. Loo Quong interpreted to me. “It is the woman,” he said. This woman he had pitied as she told him of the abuse she suffered at a brothel in San Francisco, and he had bought her from her mistress for $500. Quite in accordance with the dictates of Chinese morality, he had made her a sort of American wife. That is to say, he had his wife and son in China, and this woman was to be, after a sort, his wife in America. This he now understood to be inconsistent with Christian character; but what was he to do? I dare say he was divided in mind somewhat over the $500. He could scarcely afford to lose it altogether, and I blush to say that he could doubtless realize the full amount by selling her. But all questions of pecuniary loss or gain apart, what shall he do? To drop her is to let her fall into a life of prostitution—almost to doom her to it. He might send her to one of our Mission Homes for Women, but she is not disposed to go. Four or five years—as I understand it—they have lived together, and while, so far as his own comfort or pleasure is concerned, I believe he would give her up, would it be right thus to dispose of her? It is a knot not easily untied, a tangle not easily cleared. I have thought that there might come to him such an ‘unction from the Holy One,’ such an ‘abundant entrance into the Kingdom,’ such a clear and uplifting conversion as would resolve all doubts and show a straight path before him. If this might be so, it seems to me that he would become a worker in our missionary field such as we greatly need: a reaper whose abundant sheaves would be gathered into everlasting life. Pray for it with us.