A Tour of the Missions: Observations and ConclusionsStrong, Augustus Hopkins
Religion
A Tour of the Missions: Observations and Conclusions
Strong, Augustus Hopkins
East Asia -- Description and travel; Missions
Mr. Groesbeck said that no public notice had been given of our coming.
Yet the whole population of three hundred thousand seemed to have come
out to meet us. Imagine a street two and a half miles long, but only ten
to fifteen feet wide, thronged with water-carriers and beasts of burden
compelled to give way to our great procession! Every nook and corner of
the way, the fronts of the one-storied shops and the entrances to the
cross-streets, were all a perfect sea of faces--rows of children little
and big overtopped by rows of half-naked men, with scores of women
peering wistfully from windows in the rear--faces by thousands and tens
of thousands, till it seemed as if the whole population of the planet
had emptied itself into Chao-yang. I looked upon hundreds of splendid
forms of men, naked above the waist, and carrying heads worthy of notice
from any sculptor, none of them hateful, all of them impressed and
wondering, and they seemed to me the embodiment of China crying out for
God. When we were only half-way through the city, the endless masses of
humanity had so impressed me that I could not restrain the tears. The
sight was simply overwhelming. And all this the parish of one man! It
is to save this great city, now almost wholly given to idolatry, that
Mr. Groesbeck asks for money to build in its very center an
assembly-room and an institutional church, and that Doctor Lesher asks
for a hospital building to facilitate his medical work.
I made an address to those eighty boys that evening, as they stood at
attention before me. Half of them were still heathen, but their fathers
had sent them to this Christian school, believing that they needed a
better religion than that of Confucius or of Buddha. I urged them to
become soldiers of Christ, and to follow him as their Commander. I did
not conceal from them the fact that such following might involve
opposition and earthly loss. But I promised them that, if they suffered
with Christ, they would also reign with him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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