New Forces in Old China: An Inevitable AwakeningBrown, Arthur Judson
History
New Forces in Old China: An Inevitable Awakening
Brown, Arthur Judson
China -- Commerce; China -- Foreign relations; China -- Politics and government; Missions -- China
One of the Chinese preachers, on refusing to apostatize,
received a hundred blows upon his bare back, and then the
bleeding sufferer was told to choose between obedience and
another hundred blows. What would we have answered? Let
us, who have never been called on to suffer for Him, be modest
in saying what we would have done. But that mangled, half-
dead Chinese gasped:--``I value Jesus Christ more than life,
and I will never deny Him.'' Before all of the second hundred
blows could be inflicted, unconsciousness came and he
was left for dead. But a friend took him away by night,
bathed his wounds and secretly nursed him to recovery. I saw
him, when I was in China, and I looked reverently upon the
back that was seamed and scarred with ``the marks of the
Lord Jesus.'' Of the hundreds of Christians who were taken
inside the legation grounds in Peking, not one proved false to
their benefactors. ``In the midday heat, in the drenching
night rains, under storms of shot and shell, they fought, filled
sand-bags, built barricades, dug trenches, sang hymns and
offered prayers to the God whom the foreigner had taught
them to love.'' Even the children were faithful. During the
scream of deadly bullets, and the roar of burning buildings,
the voices of the Junior Christian Endeavour Society were
heard singing:--
``There'll be no dark valley when Jesus comes.''
Such instances could be multiplied almost indefinitely from
the experiences of Chinese Christians during the Boxer uprising.
Indeed the fortitude of the persecuted Christians was so remarkable
that in many cases the Boxers cut out the hearts of
their victims to find the secret of such sublime faith, declaring:
``They have eaten the foreigner's medicine.'' In those humble
Chinese the world has again seen a vital faith, again seen
that the age of heroism has not passed, again seen that men
and women are willing to die for Christ. Multitudes withstood
a persecution as frightful as that of the early disciples in
the gardens and arenas of Nero. If they were hypocrites why
did they not recant? As Dr. Maltbie Babcock truly said:--
``One-tenth of the hypocrisy with which they were charged
would have saved them from martyrdom.'' But thousands
of them died rather than abjure their faith, and thousands
more ``had trial of mockings and scourgings, yea, moreover
of bonds and imprisonment; they were stoned, they were
sawn asunder, they were tempted, they were slain with the
sword; they went about in sheepskins, in goatskins; being
destitute, afflicted, ill-treated; wandering in deserts and
mountains and caves and the holes of the earth.''
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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