Children -- India; India -- Social life and customs; Missions -- India
We have a rock to climb, and there is nothing the least romantic
about it. We shall have to climb it "upon our hands and upon our feet."
It is all grim earnest. "We make our way wrapped in glamour to the
Supreme Good, the summit," writes Guido Rey, the mountaineer, in the joy
of his heart. But later it is: "One precipice fell away at my feet, and
another rose above me. . . . It was no place for singing." Friends, we
shall come to such places on the Matterhorn of life. As we follow the
Gleam wherever it leads, may we count upon the upholding of those for
whom we have written--the lovers of little children?
And now, in conclusion, all I would say has already been so perfectly
said, that I cannot do better than copy from the writings of two who
fought a good fight and have been crowned--Miss Ellice Hopkins, brave,
sensitive, soldier-soul on the hardest of life's battlefields; and
George Herbert, courtier, poet, and saint. "Often in that nameless
discouragement," wrote Miss Hopkins, as she lay slowly dying, "before
unfinished tasks, unfulfilled aims and broken efforts, I have thought of
how the creative Word has fashioned the opal, made it of the same stuff
as desert sands, mere silica--not a crystallised stone like the diamond,
but rather a stone with a broken heart, traversed by hundreds of small
fissures which let in the air, the breath, as the Spirit is called in
the Greek of our Testament; and through those two transparent mediums of
such different density it is enabled to refract the light, and reflect
every lovely hue of heaven, while at its heart burns a mysterious spot
of fire. When we feel, therefore, as I have often done, nothing but
cracks and desert dust, we can say: So God maketh His precious opal!"
We would never willingly disguise one fraction of the truth in our
desire to win sympathy and true co-operation. There will be hours of
nameless discouragement for all who climb the rock. For some there will
be the "broken heart."
And yet there is a joy that is worth it all a thousand times--well worth
it all. Who that has known it will doubt it? This reach of water
recalls it. The palms, as we look at them, seem to lift their heads in
solemn consciousness of it. For the water-side--where we stand with
those for whom we have travailed in soul, when for the first time they
publicly confess their faith in Christ--is a sacred place to us.
[Illustration: THE PLACE OF BAPTISM.]
Has our story wandered sometimes into sorrowful ways? To be true it has
to be sorrowful sometimes. We look back to the day of its beginning, the
day that our first little Temple child came and opened a new door to us.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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