The average missionary comes home on his furlough, but before he is home three months he is homesick to go back to his people. So they come and go across the seas of the world through the years, weaving like a great Shuttle of Service the fabric of friendship for themselves and for the United States.
This shuttle of service is being woven night and day across the Atlantic and across the Pacific by great ships bearing missionaries going and coming; furlough following furlough, after six years of service; term after term; leaving native land, children, memories; time after time until death ends that particular thread, crimson, gold, brown or white. The great Shuttle of Love weaves the fabric of friendship across the seas as the ships come and go, bearing outbound and homebound missionaries to foreign fields.
I am thinking particularly of the Pacific as I write this sketch sitting in a room overlooking the great harbor of Yokohama where three Japanese warship lie anchored and two great Pacific liners, one on its way to San Francisco and another bound for Vancouver. They come and go, these great ships. A few days ago the Empress of Asia made its twenty-eighth trip across and it soon will start on its twenty-eighth trip back to Vancouver again. Some of the ships out of San Francisco have made more than a hundred trips. So they weave the shuttle back and forward across this great sea. And never a ship sails this sea that it does not carry its passenger list of missionaries. Our list was more than half a hundred.
As Mr. Forman, in a sympathetic and appreciative article that he has written for the Ladies' Home Journal, says, the common phrase on a Pacific liner is, "There are two hundred and fifty passengers and forty-five missionaries on board." Every Pacific passenger list immediately divides itself into two groups, the missionaries and the other passengers.
Then Mr. Forman proceeds to slay those shallow, narrow-minded, often ignorant and uneducated tourists and business men who dare to speak of this traveling missionary with derision. Mr. Forman has no particular interest in missions and he has no particular interest in the Church, but he started out to investigate this derogatory phrase, "and forty-five missionaries."
Mr. Forman starts his article with these striking paragraphs
"If ever you cross the Pacific you will find the passengers on the steamer quietly and automatically dividing themselves into two groups.
"'How many passengers have we on board?' you may lightly ask your neighbor.
"And your neighbor, traveled man no doubt (his twelfth crossing, he will mention), will smartly reply, with a suave, man-of-the-world smile: 'A hundred and two passengers and forty-five missionaries.'
"After that you will be initiated and you will be mentioning with an easy grace to some one else that there are[210] on board so many passengers and so many missionaries. It becomes a part of the jargon of Pacific crossing."