pioneer spade work of the missionaries, digging through the barricades
of language that separate the minds of men! When, then, the
missionaries had books to give the people, the people had to learn to
read. So the missionaries became educators, and wherever you find the
church you find the school. But what is the use of educating people
who do not understand how to be sanitary, who live in filth and disease
and die needlessly, and how can you take away old superstitions and not
put new science in their places, or deprive the people of witch doctors
without offering them substitutes? So the missionaries became
physicians, and one of the most beneficent enterprises that history
records is medical missions. What is the use, however, of helping
people to get well when their economic condition is such, their
standards of life so low, that they continue to fall sick again in
spite of you? So the missionaries are becoming industrial reformers,
agriculturalists, chemists, physicists, engineers, rebuilding wherever
they can the economic life and comfort of their people. The missionary
cause itself has been compelled, whether it would or not, to grow
socially-minded. As Dan Crawford says about the work in Africa: "Here,
then, is Africa's challenge to its Missionaries. Will they allow a
whole continent to live like beasts in such hovels, millions of negroes
cribbed, cabined, and confined in dens of disease? No doubt it is our
diurnal duty to preach that the soul of all improvement is the
improvement of the soul. But God's equilateral triangle of body, soul,
and spirit must never be ignored. Is not the body wholly _ensouled_,
and is not the soul wholly _embodied_? . . . In other words, in Africa
the only true fulfilling of your heavenly calling is the doing of
earthly things in a heavenly manner." [2]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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