John G. Paton, missionary to the New Hebrides, volume 3 (of 3) : $b An autobiography edited by his brotherPaton, John Gibson
Religion
John G. Paton, missionary to the New Hebrides, volume 3 (of 3) : $b An autobiography edited by his brother
Paton, John Gibson
Missionaries -- Vanuatu -- Biography; Paton, John Gibson, 1824-1907
Showing the hair divided in many locks, tortoise-shell earrings, bead
and shell necklace.
]
[Illustration:
EPETENETO,
The first native pastor in the New Hebrides
]
It is easy to raise the shallow cry that the New Hebrides Mission is
overmanned, as compared with India, China and Africa, as some, and very
specially the same men who most keenly oppose the _Dayspring_, are
persistently doing. We might answer by retort,—Your own Towns and
Villages are overmanned; why not resign your charges, and go to the
millions of Heathendom? But we leave that retort to others, and reply:
There are differences in all these fields of enterprise, which demand
specific adaptation of means to ends, and we fearlessly declare, in the
face of all Christendom, that God Himself has approved of our system by
the almost unparalleled results. We plant down our European Missionary
with his staff at a given Station. We surround him with Native Teachers,
who pioneer amongst all the Villages within reach. His life-work is to
win that Island, or that People, for God and Civilization. He masters
their Language, and reduces it to writing. He translates and prints
portions of the Bible. He opens Schools, and begins teaching the whole
population. He opens a Communicants’ Class, and trains his most hopeful
Converts for full membership in the Church. And there he holds the fort,
and toils, and prays, till the Gospel of Jesus has not only been
preached to every creature whom he can reach, but also reduced to
practice in the new habits and the new religious and social life of the
Community. In this way has Aneityum been won for Christ, and thoroughly
Christianized; and Aniwa, and Erromanga, and Efatè, and Nguna, and
Tongoa, and several adjoining Isles. And, humanly speaking, there is no
other way in which these Tribes and Peoples can be evangelized. The next
stage will be that of the Native Pastorate, with a very few
superintending European Missionaries—a stage on which, for instance, my
own Aniwa has long since practically entered, the Elders carrying on all
the work of the Church, with an occasional visit from a neighboring
Missionary. But the foundations of Civilization and of Christianity must
either be laid and solidly built up by a Missionary for each of these
Peoples, or they will never be laid at all.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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