"But that beautiful, symmetrical development did not come out of a sense of beauty. It came to fool the devils just as we have said of the roofs. The devils will glide off into space and will never be able to get down the chimneys." It is so in other Oriental countries.
* * * * * *
The same is true in the Philippine Islands. The whole fabric of human life is permeated with the black thread of fear.
It is true of China and Korea; it is true of Borneo to a marked degree; and it is true of that great mass of conglomerate humanity that we think of as India.
These and other flash-lights of fear remain, and shall remain forever in my mind. But of a fifty thousand mile trip among hundreds of millions of human beings; pictures of fear stand out, blurred here and there; but clear enough in outline so that I can still see the human faces against a background of midnight darkness.
Three pictures are clearer than the others. Perhaps it was because the flash that focused them on the plate of my mind was stronger. Perhaps it was, that the plate of my soul was more sensitive the days these impressions were focused. But they stand out; three flash-lights of fear above all:
One was told me by Zela Wiltsie Worley, a college girl, now a missionary's wife, who has known what it means to lie on the floor of her home an entire morning with machine gun bullets crashing through her home, between the fire of two revolutionary armies.
"I was talking with my Amah—she is the girl who cares for our children," said Mrs. Worley.
I nodded that I understood that.
"We were bathing the baby—our first wee kiddie—and the Amah seemed to have an unusual inclination to talk. I had been joking with her and asked her if she did not want to buy Clara Gene. In fun we started the characteristic Chinese haggling over price, she trying to 'jew' me up and I trying to 'jew' her down.