Flash-lights From The Seven Seas Part 25

Mr. Forman starts his article with these striking paragraphs

"If ever you cross the Pacific you will find the pa.s.sengers on the steamer quietly and automatically dividing themselves into two groups.

"'How many pa.s.sengers have we on board?' you may lightly ask your neighbor.

"And your neighbor, traveled man no doubt (his twelfth crossing, he will mention), will smartly reply, with a suave, man-of-the-world smile: 'A hundred and two pa.s.sengers and forty-five missionaries.'

"After that you will be initiated and you will be mentioning with an easy grace to some one else that there are on board so many pa.s.sengers and so many missionaries. It becomes a part of the jargon of Pacific crossing."

But Mr. Forman sees working that Shuttle of Service of which I am speaking. He sees, as any thinking man sees, as Roosevelt saw, as Bryan saw, and as Taft saw, that the greatest single influence for good in the Orient is the missionary. Mr. Forman was incensed at this careless phrase on the Pacific liners, and he investigated the work of our missionaries when he was in the Orient, and he came to the decision that they are worth more to America, even from that selfish standpoint, than all the amba.s.sadors that we have sent over, because they are, in their crossing and recrossing, weaving a Fabric of Friendship between the Orient and the Occident; between the nations of the East and those of the West; between the white peoples and the brown peoples; in spite of the diplomatic differences and yellow newspapers in the United States and j.a.pan.

Mr. Forman says about his conclusions:

"I concluded that any one of the large missions in those Oriental countries accomplished, so far as concerns American standing and prestige, more than all our diplomatic representation there put together. I do not believe it to be an exaggeration to say that for the Orient the missionaries are perhaps the only useful form of what is called diplomatic representation."

And again in the same article he says:

"One good missionary in the right place, it seemed to me, can accomplish more than quite a number of amba.s.sadors."

And again he wonderfully sums up that mission of love in a paragraph which I think ought to be pa.s.sed on:

"But when a missionary establishes a clinic or a hospital, healing sores and diseases that their own medicine men have abandoned as hopeless; when he educates boys and girls that otherwise would have remained in darkness; when, with a whole-souled enthusiasm, he gives them counsel, aid and service and he asks nothing in return then the stolid and pa.s.sive Chinese or Korean is genuinely impressed. Then America really becomes in his mind the synonym for kindness and service, and from mouth to mouth goes abroad the fame of the land that is aiming to do him good, without any menacing background of exploitation."

I talked with one bright-faced, twinkling-eyed, red-blooded, big-framed missionary who was crossing with his family of a wife and four children.

He had spent fifteen years in the Orient as a missionary, and then because of illness he had been compelled to go to America. There he had taken a church and had preached for five years. His health came back, and as he told me, "The lure of the East got me and I had to come back.

I never was so happy in my life as I am on this trip and the whole family feels the same way. We are going back to _our people_!" And the way he p.r.o.nounced those _italicised_ words made me know that he, too, was weaving a thread in the Fabric of Friendship.

We met a woman who was traveling back to China with her three darling little tots. I made love to all three of them, and it wasn't long before I asked one where her Daddy was. I a.s.sumed, of course, that they had been home on a furlough and that Daddy was back there in China waiting anxiously for them to return to him. I pictured that meeting, for I have seen many such during war days, both on this side and in France.

"My Daddy is dead," the child said simply with a quiver of her little lips.

"All right, dear baby, we won't talk about it then," for I was afraid that those little trembling lips couldn't hold in much longer. But she wanted to tell me about it. I soon saw that. She liked to talk about her "dear dead Daddy."

"He went to France," she said simply.

"Ah, he was a soldier?" I questioned.

"No, he was better than a soldier, my Mamma says. He did not go to kill; he went to help." And back of that sentiment and that statement I saw a world of struggle and ideals in a missionary home where the man felt called across the seas to be "in it" with his country and at last the refuge of the man who could go "not to kill but to help."

"He went to work with the coolies and he got the influenza and died last winter. We won't have any Daddy any more," and her little blue eyes were misty with tears. And so were mine, more misty than I dared let her see.

And they are misty now as I write about it. And yours will be misty if you read about it, as they should be. That is something fine in you being called out.

Later I met the mother. She told me over again the story that little Doris had told me of the big Daddy who had felt the call to go to France in the Y.M.C.A. to help the poor "coolies," several hundred of whom were, by strange coincidence, going back to China on the same boat with us, and with that brave mother and those dear children. These "coolies"

were going back alive, but he who went to serve them died. "Others he saved; Himself he could not save," echoed in my soul as that mother and I talked.

"I am going back to the Chinese to spend the rest of my life finishing Will's work. It is better so. I shall be happier."

"But the a.s.sociation there--everything--every turn you make--every place you go--will remind you of him," I protested.

"It would be what Will would want most of all, that I go on with his work. I go gladly. It will be the best balm for my sorrow."

And far above national friendships there loom these snow-white peaks of the sacrificial friendship the missionaries bear in their hearts for the people with whom they live, and serve, and die.

THE END