Fifteen Years Among the Top-Knots; Or, Life in KoreaUnderwood, Lillias H. (Lillias Horton)
Religion
Fifteen Years Among the Top-Knots; Or, Life in Korea
Underwood, Lillias H. (Lillias Horton)
Korea -- Description and travel; Missions -- Korea
In the meanwhile, in the fall of 1894, Mr. McKenzie, who had arrived
from Canada in the winter of 1893, and, as we have said, had gone to
Dr. Hall’s relief, after his return decided to go to the interior, the
better to learn the language and people, and to live there as much as
possible in every way like a native. Mr. Underwood advised him to go
to the village of Sorai, or Song Chun, then under his care, where he
had baptized almost the first converts ever received in the Korean
church. Here he found a few Christians who received him as a brother.
He made his home with one of them, and at once began to preach Christ
by example. Long before the people understood his broken Korean they
read his beautiful life, and little by little a change came over the
whole community. We all thought of him often in his loneliness in that
far-off hamlet, where, though he was a great light to the people, there
was no real companionship for him. At Christmas we sent him a box of
home-made bread, plumb-cake, canned fruits and vegetables, tea and milk
and sugar, for we knew he had no foreign food and that he was living
solely on Korean diet, but we did not know that it consisted of rice
chiefly, with a chicken once a week, and occasionally a few eggs.
When our box reached him, he handed the contents all over to the
Koreans. He wrote that he _dared_ not taste them, knowing that if he
did it would be impossible to go back to native food. Meanwhile one
and another of the villagers and people in the vicinity were giving up
their old heathen idols and turning to Christ.
Some years before the Christians of that village had asked Mr.
Underwood to give them a church, but, like the young man who came
to Jesus, they went away sorrowful, when told they must build it
themselves. Now, however, they again took up the idea in a different
spirit. Near the village was a rising piece of ground on which stood
a little grove, in midst of which had been for many years the shrine
where the village deities were worshiped. This had long been neglected
and destroyed, and here it was decided to build the new church. Every
one gave as the Lord had prospered him, gladly, enthusiastically, and a
heathen master builder undertook to direct the erection of the building
on half pay, because it was for the great “chief God of heaven,” as he
understood. Very likely he knew little enough of the one only God for
whose service it was raised, but not very long after he learned both to
know and love him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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