The city of Peshawur, upon the Afghan frontier, has long been a
centre of missionary work. The fanaticism of the people when it
was first occupied by British troops seemed to make missionary
enterprise impossible. One Commissioner--he afterwards fell by
the hand of an assassin--refused permission for missionaries to
come, on the ground that they would excite the fanaticism of the
people to a dangerous pitch. The arrival of Herbert Edwardes
changed the situation. A meeting of English people, military and
civil, was called in Peshawur itself; a sum of £3,000 was raised, a
memorial sent to the Church Missionary Society, and, in response,
missionaries provided. Here is an example of what is so often
forgotten by critics of Indian missions, that they in a large
measure owe their origin and support to men actually or formerly
engaged in the administration of India. The Church Missionary
Society has been peculiarly happy in the number of men of high
distinction in the Army and the Civil Service who have served on
its Committee. Now from the Punjab men are pushing still farther
afield; Quetta has long been occupied, and the medical missionary
has found a welcome from the Afridis themselves.
Let us take another mission founded in answer to an appeal from
without, and that an appeal from a layman. People who recall the
missionary meetings of a generation ago will remember that no
more thrilling story was told at them than the history of William
Duncan's early work amongst the Tsimshean Indians of the North
Pacific coast. It was a marvellous example of courage, tact, and
patience, rewarded by the conversion of savages of a singularly
unapproachable type. It was a naval officer, Captain Prevost, who
suggested that mission to the Society, carried Mr. Duncan thither,
and landed him at Fort Simpson in 1857. In ten years' time he had
baptised nearly three hundred adult converts. In 1862 the Christian
community was moved to Metlakahtla, where the spectacle of a
cannibal and violent people living in peace and industry was long
deemed one of the marvels of missionary enterprise.
I pass by such striking histories as those of Uganda, of the attempt
of J. A. Robinson and Graham Wilmot Brooke to reach the Soudan from
the Niger, and of the massacre of English women at Hwa-Sang in
Fuh-kien, to recall romances of another kind. What could be more
moving than the careers of some of the Society's converts? Is there
any more striking history of its kind than that of the Rev. Dr.
Imad-ud-din, a learned Mohammedan, who had sought the peace of God
by every available means, and at last found it in Christ? Or what
would they who distrust converts say to the career of that once
notorious Border bandit, Dilawar Khan, baptised in 1858, who served
as an officer in the Guides, and died in Chitral whilst in the
service of the British Government?
But it is time to leave these things and to speak of some aspects of
the Society's work which concern all missionary enterprise.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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