The American Missionary — Volume 33, No. 10, October, 1879Various
Religion
The American Missionary — Volume 33, No. 10, October, 1879
Various
Congregational churches -- Missions -- Periodicals; Home missions -- Periodicals
Our Lord has begun—sooner than we desired and very suddenly to
us—to gather from our harvest field His wheat into His garner. The
first-fruits went home on Sunday, Aug. 3d, at our Bethany church. I
was in the act of baptizing and welcoming to Christian fellowship
on earth _four_ of our more recently converted Chinese brethren,
when our brother Ong Lune was welcomed to the fellowship above. He
was a young man of 21 years, had been a Christian, as we hoped,
for nearly three years, and a church member since December, 1877.
His sickness was brief, and he was supposed to be recovering till
about twenty-four hours before his death. He had greatly desired
to become strong enough to be present at our August communion, but,
instead, he ate bread in the kingdom of God.
Modest and unassuming, but intelligent, earnest and thoroughly
consecrated to Christ, his absence from our mission work makes a
void not easily filled. A great majority of American Christians
might well have sat at the feet of this young Chinaman and learned
how to be co-workers with the Saviour. Approaching his countrymen
with a smile, seizing every opportunity to “speak a word in
season,” he sought to bring them to our schools, and then to lead
them to his Saviour. A house-servant, with little time that he
could call his own, he will wear no starless crown. I know not how
many times the question, “Who told you to come to school?” has been
answered by the utterance of his name. The last service he was able
to render was—in spite of pain and weariness from the disease which
afterwards proved fatal—to act as my interpreter in the examination
of three candidates for baptism, one of them, possibly, his own
child in the Gospel.
His teacher—Miss Florence N. Wooley—quotes him as saying that what
he wanted was “to bring more and more scholars, and watch them,
and when they know about Jesus, must make them to be our brethren
and try to keep them from temptation; and I wish to do the best I
can, but am afraid of temptation myself.” She adds: “He succeeded
in this; and the secret of his success, as told me by one of the
scholars, was this: ‘He talked so nice to the boys, and never got
cross nor angry; and so they all minded what he told them.’ He had
entered into the spirit of the word, ‘Go out into the highways and
hedges and compel them to come in.’ As soon as he came into school
he was wont to speak of some one who had promised him to come that
night. If this promise was not fulfilled, he went after the person
again and again and brought him in. He was getting on well in his
studies, especially in his study of the Bible. The last verses he
recited were Acts vii. 54, 55, now happily fulfilled in his own
experience.”
THE STORY OF LEE FOUN, BY LEE HAIM.
[Lee Haim, one of our helpers, had given me this account, and I
requested him to write it for the MISSIONARY. I give it as he wrote
it, word for word, correcting only a few expressions to make the
sense clear.—W. C. P.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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