2. The Living God, Who Hears and Answers Prayer.
THE effect of idolatry is seen in every phase of Chinese life, socially and morally; indeed so far have the people wandered from the true God that they appear to see no connection between religion and morality.
A man who faithfully worships his idols, burns incense before his ancestors, and, by a fair amount of good works, seeks his soul’s salvation, is considered a religious man, irrespective of his morality; and if he abstain from eating meat, and be careful not to destroy the life of any creature, he may cheat, and lie, and be guilty of many sins which could not be mentioned here. The position of the woman is that of a slave; she is purchased when a child for so much silver, and seldom sees her husband before the day of their marriage. Children are always desired, but the arrival of a little girl is looked upon as a misfortune, and thousands are destroyed in infancy. A father is at liberty, if he chooses, to kill his child, provided he can satisfy the magistrates that the child was unmanageable, and that it was therefore for the good of the State and of society that he had destroyed him.
What I have here said will, I think, be sufficient to show, that the marks of the conversion of a Chinaman to Christ are very different from what we see in a country where the gospel has been preached for generations past. In the case of the idolater, he is suddenly brought out of the deepest darkness into the clear noonday of God’s grace. His whole course of life has to be changed, and very often his occupation. Persecution is generally the first test of his faith. His friends forsake him, and oftentimes his wife and children desert or deny him. His property, if he have any, is frequently forfeited because he cannot now worship his ancestors as heretofore. He is beaten by his neighbors, and has frequently to flee from his native village, and to suffer others to take possession of his fields and to reap his harvests. Such severe persecution does not, however, always meet the young convert.
The following account of the conversion of Mr. Sang yü-lin will give an idea of the sort of results which follow the preaching of the gospel in China.
In the winter of 1883 and 1884 there were great floods in the eastern part of North China, owing to the bursting of the banks of the Yellow River―a circumstance of no very rare occurrence. Hundreds of thousands of poor people were flooded out of their houses and homes, and compelled to flee for their lives into other districts. So great was this sudden inundation that eight counties were desolated, and for several months the people were unable to till their fields, or return to their homes. Thirty thousand of these poor creatures came down to the city of Yangchou, where I was then living, and camped outside the city walls. They had no food, and were but thinly clad. Numbers of them died every day from sickness, or starvation. The government tried to meet the emergency by giving away daily a small quantity of rice to each family, but this barely sufficed to keep the people alive. Their condition was, indeed, deplorable. They built themselves little huts, or they dug holes in the ground, over which they placed straw mats to keep out the cold east winds, and many of them had not so much as a handful of straw to lie upon. After a short time small-pox began to rage among them, and many were carried off.
These refugees came from a part of China where the gospel has not been preached, and the people were, therefore, utterly ignorant of our teaching or manner of life. Two native brethren, with myself, were able to go among them occasionally, and to preach to them; but when we did this, so many thousands crowded around to hear us that the soldiers, who were charged to keep the refugees in their compounds, according to the respective counties from whence they had come, drove them back with long sticks. We were able, however, to scatter large numbers of tracts among them, and also to invite them to come to our preaching station inside the city, there to learn more of the glad tidings we proclaimed.
A few days after our first visit to them, a man named Sang, which means “mulberry tree,” came to our house and knocked at the gate for admission. The gatekeeper for a long time refused to admit him, thinking that his object was to beg. The poor man’s importunity finally prevailed, and he was allowed to come in.
“My son is sick,” said he, “and I am afraid he will die; hearing that you can heal diseases, I have brought him to see you.”
I assured Sang that I was not a doctor, and was afraid I could not do much for the boy, but, said I, “My God is a living God, and One who hears prayer,” and added, that if he desired me to do so, I would pray for his son. Then seeing how sick the poor boy was, I said, “You will have to leave your child here with me, for he needs careful nursing and proper food.”
To this the man readily agreed, but not so the little sufferer, who was of some thirteen years of age, and had never seen a foreigner before. An invitation for the father to stay with him settled the matter at once, and we rigged them up a bed in our dining room, and made them as comfortable as we could. Mr. Sang presented himself regularly at our public preaching every afternoon, and soon manifested an interest in the gospel.
A day or two after his arrival, we had our usual native prayer-meeting, into which, to our surprise, came Mr. Sang. He had never been present before where Christians prayed, and was astonished to see men kneeling down and speaking to a God they could not see. I could but observe him looking round the little room, and mark his astonished look. There were no idols, nor lighted tapers, nor was any incense burning―things inseparably associated with his heathen worship.
It was to him a novel procedure, but he evidently had some sort of faith in its efficacy. So, watching for an opportunity, at a slight pause in our meeting, lo! Sang, the heathen, began to pray. He commenced thus: ―
“I don’t know who You are!” for he knew not our God’s name, and he proceeded to tell God that, though he did not know who He was, he understood from others that He was a God who heard prayer, and he would therefore venture to ask that his boy might be healed, and, said he, “If You will heal my boy, then, when I return to my home, I and my family will no longer worship the goddess of mercy, but will worship You instead.”
Sang suddenly stopped, and, after a pause, we all said “Amen!” believing the man had prayed from his heart.
He came regularly to our meetings for prayer, and a fortnight later prayed again, but this time in a very different manner. He commenced by thanking God for having sent His Son, Jesus Christ, into the world to die for his sins. He also thanked God for the improvement in his child’s health, and finished by declaring that if men refused to believe His word and accept His Christ, they deserved to be lost. Another silence told us when to say “Amen.”
Mr. Sang is a simple-minded man, but very intelligent; he is able to read and write fairly well. The following little incident shows the simplicity of his faith. For some time I had noticed that his clothing was not well adapted to the very cold weather we were having, and at the close of one of the evening prayer meetings, I asked him to remain behind a few minutes, as I wished to speak to him. Presently I returned with a heavy, wadded Chinese gown, which I thought would be of more real use to him than to myself, and asked him to accept it as from the Lord.
He quietly took it from my hands, placed it upon a table close by, but said not a word. He walked over to the further corner of the room and knelt down before a chair for about five seconds; he then got up, and coming over to me, made the usual salutation of pulling the sleeves over the hands, and putting the hands together, lifting them up to the head, and bowing, and then thanked me for the gift.
“Why did you go over to the other side of the room?” said I.
“To thank God for His grace,” replied he; “and now I thank you.”
In the course of two or three months Mr. Sang returned to his native village a changed man, joyfully expecting, like many another young convert, that he should be able to persuade large numbers of his neighbors to cast away their false gods, and join him in the service of the true and living God. He carried back with him two small boxes of scriptures and tracts, to sell during his proposed missionary tours in the numerous villages surrounding his own. These were heavy, and occupied one side of his barrow during his return journey, whilst his wife and a baby occupied the other. His boy, who was sound and well, walked with him, and thus they traveled back.
Several other men, among the refugees from the same part of the country, came under the influence of the gospel at this time, and, we had good reason to believe, also returned to their homes with changed views of spiritual things, if not with hearts really turned to God by His Spirit.
Six months after this, a missionary to whom I had given the history of our friend, took a journey in the north of the Kiang-su province, and made a point of looking up Mr. Sang. On arriving at the village of Cha-miao he found the cottage in which the Sang family lived, but, to his disappointment, Sang was not at home. The next day was the Lord’s day; he had just gone off on one of his missionary tours, and was not expected back for some little time. I should say that he and his family kept the Lord’s day, and that he devoted it greatly to His work.
As the missionary earnestly wished to see our friend, he called together some half dozen Christians, who had been converted in the village through the instrumentality of Sang yü-lin, and they asked God to send him back at once. The next morning, to their great joy, Sang was seen walking into the village! He had been seized with the conviction that he was needed at home for something, he knew not what; instead of continuing his journey, he had returned with all speed, and upon his arrival he understood that the leading had been of the Lord.
Mr. Sang is a farmer, and spends all the time he can in evangelizing his neighborhood. The Lord Jesus Christ has become to him a living reality, and he greatly desires that his friends and neighbors should likewise find rest and joy in his Saviour. He gets his fields cultivated as early as possible, and then, instead of idling away the winter months, as he did in former days, he spends his time in preaching the gospel, and putting into circulation the books and tracts with which Christian friends in England have enabled me to supply him.
One of the six Christians the missionary found in the village was Mr. Sang’s boy, whom we had treated in my house. He had been long ago restored to health, and had followed the example of his father, in giving his young heart to the Lord, and he had learned to pray to a God who could hear, and to the living One who answers prayer. The evident devotion of this lad, of fourteen years of age, greatly cheered the missionary’s heart.
Perhaps among our readers there are some who, by God’s mercy, have been raised from a bed of sickness. Have they, like my young Chinese friend, shown their gratitude by giving an attentive ear to the yearning love of the Lord Jesus Christ, and resolved that from henceforth He alone should sit as King upon the throne of their hearts to reign there. A. G. P.