If you would attend a gathering of native pastors in Turkey you would find that they compare favourably in appearance and manners and intelligence and education with the members of any conference or presbytery or ministerial association in the United States, and that is one of the reasons why their work has been so successful. The Moslem priests and the clergy of the orthodox Greek and Armenian churches are almost universally uncouth and illiterate men and the public in Turkey is prompt and keen in detecting the difference.
President Angell, of the University of Michigan, who was United States minister to Turkey for several years, once said: “So far as Americans are concerned the missionary work in European Turkey and Asia Minor is and long has been almost exclusively in the hands of the American Board. In no part of the world has that board or any board had abler or more devoted representatives to preach the gospel, to conduct schools and colleges or to establish and administer hospitals. Wherever an American mission is established, there is a centre of alert, enterprising American life, whose influence in a hundred ways is felt even by the lethargic Oriental life.”
The vital need, however, is chapels. Every congregation ought to have a home and its own place of worship. It is not necessary to explain the advantages. They are obvious. It is just ten times as important for a native congregation in Turkey to have its own house of worship as it is for a congregation in the United States, and for the same reason. And, as a rule, the congregation in the United States has ten times the financial ability to provide its own house of worship as the little circle of native believers in Turkey.
Each of the one hundred and fifty-nine American missionaries in Turkey to-day has a district like the diocese of an Episcopal bishop, with a dozen or twenty churches under his care. He visits them regularly, advises with their pastors, superintends their schools, and exercises a paternal authority over the people. They consult him concerning their temporal as well as their spiritual welfare, not only the members of his congregation, but men of every class. No class of people in all Turkey are so trusted by the officials and the public and by every race as the American missionaries. All classes accept the word of a missionary without question. Money is intrusted to him for safe-keeping or for transmission to other hands without asking for a receipt, and it is a common thing for officials of high rank to seek counsel of missionaries when they are in doubt or in danger. As a well-known writer has said:
“They know that in times of trouble the missionary is their best friend, no matter how much they may have abused him in times of prosperity. They know that he will always do what he believes to be for their best good, even though there may be a difference of judgment as to what is the best thing. In the midst of Oriental duplicity the missionaries have established a reputation for speaking the truth. At first this was one of the severest puzzles to the Turks in the dealings of the missionaries with the government. They could conceive of no reason for telling the truth under such circumstances, so they were completely misled.”
Under the new régime, the missionaries are having their own way. They are being sought instead of seeking. Not only are they free to come and go and introduce American ideas and knowledge, but the government is taking away their best native teachers and is using them for the education of more young men and young women who are needed to take charge of the public schools.
Until the constitution was proclaimed missionary education and medical work was seriously hampered throughout the Levant by the government authorities, and the remarkable results that have been accomplished by the American missionaries have been obtained in the face of all kinds of obstacles and embarrassments. Travelling permits were refused by the police and neither the missionaries nor their native helpers were allowed to go freely from place to place. The missionaries, when buying real estate, often have been required to give pledges that it would not be used for religious or educational purposes. Twenty-nine years ago the Protestants of Constantinople purchased a site for a house of worship, and the American ambassador has not yet been able to obtain permission for them to erect a building. Places of worship and schools have frequently been closed by order of the officials. The residences and the school-houses of American missionaries have often been searched and books and manuscripts—even ordinary text books—have been seized and destroyed. Schools have been burned by local fanatics and several American missionaries have suffered martyrdom.
No Moslem can be released from his religious obligations, and when he renounces his faith and professes any other religion the only punishment is death. Hitherto the only safety for a convert was to flee from his country before his conversion became known. This is not strange when it is considered that Islam is the political as well as the religious system of the country; the judges of the courts are theologians; the shariat, or code of laws, is based upon the Koran, and both are grounded upon divine authority as set forth in the teachings of the Prophet.
In discussing this question with the late Rev. Herbert M. Allen, editor and founder of The Orient, the enterprising American missionary newspaper, at Constantinople, whose death in 1910 was a sad loss to the cause of civilization in Turkey, he said:
“The most imperative need of Turkey in an educational way at present is a high-class theological seminary, such as you have in Chicago and New York. Here we are in the land of the Bible. Nearly all the religions of the world originated in this section. Here the gospel was first preached. Turkey is occupied to-day with the same races that lived here then, all of them preserving their memorials. I believe that a non-sectarian theological seminary established here for the purpose of teaching Biblical history and comparative theology in a broad way would appeal to every one of these races. The schools of theology that we have to-day appeal only to those who intend to enter the Protestant missionary service, but a seminary on a university basis, like that at Chicago, would draw ambitious young men from all races and denominations, and would undoubtedly receive sufficient patronage to become self supporting with the aid of the endowments that such an institution should command.