FLASH-LIGHTS OF FAITH
He was an old man; gray-haired, gray-bearded; gray-gowned; and he knew
that the Japanese Gendarmes would just as soon take his life as light a
cigarette. They do each with inhumane impunity. One means as much to
them as the other.
He was under arrest for conspiracy in the Independence Movement.
"Do you know about the Independence Movement?" he was asked.
"Yes, I know all about it," was his fearless reply; though he knew that
that reply in itself might mean his death; even without trial or further
evidence. Just the fact that he had admitted that he knew anything at
all about the movement was enough to throw him into prison. He was like
an old Prophet in his demeanor. Something about the very dignity and
sublime Faith of the man awed the souls of these crude barbarians from
the Island Empire.
"Since when was it begun?" asked the Gendarmes.
"Since ten years ago when you Japanese first came to Korea," was the
dignified reply.
"From whence did it spring?" he was asked next.
"From the hearts of twenty million people!"
"Did twenty millions of people all get together then, and plan?"
"Not together in body but in spirit!"
"But there must have been some men to start it?" the Japanese Gendarme
said.
"They all started it!" was the old man's reply.
"Is there no one who had charge of this movement from the beginning?"
"Yes, there is one!"
"Do you know him?"
"I know him well!"
"What is his name?"
"His name is God!" said this seventy-year old, fearless Christian Korean
Patriot.
Such faith as I have indicated in the paragraphs above is a common thing
in Korea. Never in the history of the world have Christian people been
subjected to the same tortures, the same cruelties, the same terrors,
for their Faith as the early Christian martyrs; save these; the Koreans.
We had thought that the world had gotten past that day when men would be
tortured, crushed, persecuted, and killed because they were Christians
but that day is not yet past as almost any American Missionary in Korea
will testify.
The Japanese officials will say that there is no persecution because of
Christianity; but missionaries in Korea know better. They will point to
countless incidents when men, women and children have been hounded, and
persecuted for no other reason than that they were Christians.
"And when Jesus heard it, He marveled greatly and said to them that
followed, Verily I say unto you I have not found so great faith, no, not
in Israel!" might well be said of the Korean Christians every hour,
every minute, every second. They know what it means to die for their
Faith.
The story of Pak Suk Han is one of the most thrilling illustrations of
Faith that I have ever heard in Oriental lands. He had been a Christian
since he was seven years of age. He was a brilliant speaker and the
Assistant Pastor of the First Methodist Church at Pyeng Yang, where,
even the non-Christians loved him. He was arrested on Independence Day
and sent to prison where a barbarous Japanese officer, whom the natives
called "The Brute" kicked him in the side because he would not give up
his Christ. From that kick and further inhuman treatment running over a
period of six months; a disease developed which a most reliable
missionary doctor told me ended Pak Suk Han's life.
When he knew that he was about to die he said, "I have been a Christian
and have served the church since I was seven years old. I have given my
life to Christ, all but the last six months in prison which I have given
to my country. I have no regrets. I might have lived had I been willing
to deny my nation's rights and give up my Christ. I am going home to my
Father's house. Good-by!" No Christian martyrs in the early centuries of
the persecutions by Rome ever died with greater glory in their souls; or
with deeper Faith!
* * * * *
The temperature was zero.
The cold had swept down over night from the Siberian and Manchurian
plains across the city of Seoul. The capital city of Korea was shivering
with cold. But it was vibrant with something else. It was vibrant with a
great sense of something impending.
There were those who said that the restlessness in the souls of the
Koreans had died down with the terrible days of the March Independence
Movement; but I knew that the faith of the people was deeper than that.
I knew that the flame of faith was just smouldering.
I sensed this from the conversation of old-time missionaries who had
been in Korea from the very beginning. I sensed it in the conversation
of young Koreans who had graduated from American schools. It was there;
a vibrant, living, pulsing, faith in God and in the justice of their
hopes: the Independence of Korea.
The whole thing was summed up for me in a flash. It was a flash of the
light of a tremendous faith that blinded mine eyes for a day; but my
soul it lighted as with a great eternal light.
A Korean boy stepped into the home of a missionary friend of mine, whose
name I dare not use. If I did he would likely be sent home by the
Japanese. Men have been sent home for less.
The snow crunched under his feet as he walked up across the yard and the
porch. He knocked at the door.
"Come in," said the missionary, kindly.
The boy stepped in. The missionary had never seen him before. The boy
was moved deeply as with a great emotion. He seemed to have carried into
that quiet missionary home with him some of the tenseness of the outside
air and some of the tenseness of the political situation.
"What do you want?" asked the missionary.
"I want to talk with you about something very important," he replied in
Korean.
"All right! Go ahead! Do not be afraid. I am your friend!"
"So I know. All missionaries are our friends."
"Then you need not be afraid to talk."
"No!" said the boy. But he did not talk. His agitation was growing more
marked.
"Go on, my boy! Tell me what you came for."
The Korean boy looked at the half open door which led into the kitchen.
The missionary, without a word, stepped over and closed that door,
because he understood.
The boy himself closed a door which led into the missionary's study. For
in Korea in these days no home; not even a missionary's home, is free
from spies.
The boy started to talk hurriedly. The missionary soon saw that he was
not talking about the thing that he had come for.
"Come to the point! Come to the point! You did not come to me, in such
secrecy, to talk commonplace things like that!" said the missionary a
bit sharply.
Then the boy suddenly dropped to his knees behind the missionary's desk
and whipped out a big knife. Then he took from his white gown a long
piece of white cloth. This he laid out on the floor. Then he opened his
sharp knife with a quick motion and before the missionary knew it, he
had ripped the index finger of his right hand, from, the tip to the
palm, clear to the bone, until the blood spurted all over the floor.
"What are you doing, my boy?" cried the missionary.
The boy smiled a sublime smile and then knelt on his knees over the
white cloth and before the missionary's tear-misty eyes wrote across the
immaculate cloth in his own blood the words: "Mansei! Mansei! Mansei!
Korean Independence Forever! Self-determination!"
Then underneath these words in a few swift strokes in his own blood he
drew a picture of the Korean flag. And as he drew, now and then the
blood would not flow fast enough; and he took his knife, as one primes a
fountain pen; and cut a bit deeper to open new veins in order that the
flag of his country and the declaration of his faith might be written in
the deepest colors that his own veins could furnish.
Finally, after what seemed hours he jumped to his feet and handed the
missionary that flag; crying as he did so: "That is our faith! That is
the way we Koreans feel! You are going back to America! We want America
to know that our faith in the Independence of Korea has not died! The
fire burns higher to-day than ever. The Japanese cruelties are worse!
The need is greater! The oppression is more terrible! Our determination
is deeper than ever before! I have come here this day, knowing that you
are going back to America; I came to write these words in my own blood
that you may know; and that America may know; that our faith is a flame
which burns out like the beacon lights on the Korean hills, never to
die!"
* * * * *
The most scintillating Flash-light of Faith that I saw in the Orient was
in the Philippine Islands. We were traveling the jungle trail to visit a
tribe of naked Negritos. These are diminutive people who look like
American negroes only they are much smaller; much more underfed, and who
live in trees very much like the Orangutans of Borneo. They eat roots
and nuts. They hunt with bows and arrows.
They are the lowest tribe in mentality on the Islands.
It was a terribly hot, tropical day and I had a sunstroke on the way up
the mountainside to this Negrito village.
I did not expect to get back alive.
For three solid hours under a killing tropical sun, without the proper
cork helmet and protection, a pile driver kept hammering down on my
head. I felt it at every step I took. Finally I dropped unconscious on
the trail. After several hours I was able to proceed to the top of the
mountain, where the Negritos were camped.
We got there about two o'clock and had lunch. As we ate about fifty
Negritos swarmed about us.
They were a horrible looking crowd; stark naked, filthy with dirt;
starved to skin and bones; and animal-like in every look and move.
I was so sick that I was not able to eat the lunch which had been
provided in baskets. I lay on my back trying to get back my strength.
As the rest of the expedition ate, the Negritos with hungry eyes,
crowded closer.
One hideous old man was in the forefront of the natives. He was so
hideous looking that he was sickeningly repulsive to me as I looked at
him crouched as he was like an animal with a streak of sunlight playing
on his face.
This streak of sunlight, with ruthless severity, made the ugly scabs of
dirt stand out on his old wrinkled face. That face had not felt the
touch of water in years. His whole body was covered with dirt and sores.
Wherever the sunlight struck on that black body it revealed scales like
those on a mangy dog. His body was also covered with gray hairs matted
into the dirt.
"That old codger represents the nearest thing to an animal that the
human being can reach," said McLaughlin, one of the oldest missionaries
on the island.
"You're right!" I said. "He looks as much like a Borneo Orangutan as any
human being I ever saw."
"And he lives like one, too; up in a tree in a nest of matted limbs and
grass," said another.
"I've traveled among the wild tribes of the world all my life and I have
seen the lowest human beings on earth; in Africa, South America,
Malaysia, Borneo, Java--Australia--everywhere," said a widely traveled
man in the crowd, "and I never saw a type as low in the scale as that
old fellow!"
So we discussed him as the lunch proceeded. He did not know, of course,
that we had consigned him to the lowest rung on the ladder of humanity,
so he just sat looking at us with his animal-like eyes as we ate; and at
me as I lay under a tree trying to recover my strength for the trip
back.
"He is not a human being!" added a philosopher in the crowd. "He is
lower than that stage. He doesn't seem to have a single spark of
humanity left in him!"
Then the meal over; the missionaries started to hand out what was left
of the food to these starving Negritos. The old man whom we had decided
was the lowest type of a human being on earth seemed, after all, to be
the leader of the tribe; no doubt because of his age; perhaps because of
something else which we were later to discover.
McLaughlin handed out a sandwich to the old man.
"Did he eat it himself?"
"He did not! He handed it to a child near by."
McLaughlin handed out another sandwich which was left.
"Did the old man, whom we had decided was more of an animal than a human
being, eat that one?"
"He did not. He took it over behind a tree where another old man was
timidly hiding and gave it to him."
McLaughlin handed out another sandwich.
"Did the old man eat that one?"
"He did not. He took it over and gave it to an old woman near by."
And so it continued, until every last piece of food was disposed of.
That old man; whom we had decided was an animal; saw to it, that every
man, woman, and child in that crowd was fed before he took a single bite
himself.
Then he suddenly disappeared. In half an hour he came back with an
armful of great, broad, palm leaves. He spread these out on the ground
in the shade of a tree; did this old man; this hideous looking monster;
and then motioned for me to lie down on the bed he had made for me. He
saw that I was sick.
Then he disappeared once again, and when he returned he was carrying a
long Bamboo-tube full of clear, cool water which he had gotten from a
mountain spring. He brought it to where I was lying on the bed he had
made for me and with this water he cooled my fevered, burning head; and
from this water he gave me to drink; he whom we had decided was the
lowest type of a human being on earth.
And I am writing here to say; that I have never seen a "cup of cold
water given in His name" that was given with a higher, or a deeper sense
of the Divine spark of God in humanity than I saw that tropical summer
afternoon, and this water was given by the naked Negrito whom we had
decided was the lowest human being on the earth. Yet even in this
animal-man; even in this naked savage; there was a spark of the Divine
that made us forever have a deeper and a more abiding faith that God
never did and never shall make a man to live on this old earth that He
did not have some purpose in making him.
A few days before I took this trip up into the jungles of Luzon to visit
this Negrito tribe I had received a copy of a slender volume of poems by
Edna St. Vincent Millay. In the cool beauty of the tropical evening
preceding this trip I had read the last lines of its introductory poem
called "Interim"; and these lines came flashing into my mind, even as I
lay on the hot earth on that Luzon hillside. I can still remember the
honey dripping like rain from the Cocoanut trees, and I can still hear
the ceaseless and maddening cry of millions of Locusts that hot day; but
suddenly came this beautiful outpouring of faith from, the cool depths
of a woman's woodland soul:
"Not Truth but Faith, it is
That keeps the world alive! If, all at once
Faith were to slacken,--that unconscious faith
Which must, I know, yet be the corner-stone
Of all believing--birds now flying fearless
Across would drop in terror to the earth;
Fishes would drown; and the all-governing reins
Would tangle in the frantic hands of God
And the worlds gallop headlong to destruction!"
That day bred new faith into my soul!
I have told this story of the naked Negrito a hundred times since that
eventful day and it kindles new flames of faith in human hearts every
time it is repeated! Mr. Edmund Vance Cooke, the poet, heard it in
Cleveland where I spoke in a Chautauqua programme and he said to me
several months later in my home at Detroit, Michigan, "That was the most
thrilling story of the Divine spark in a savage soul that I have ever
heard! It gave me new faith in God and in humanity!"
These, and a thousand other Flashlights of Faith come flashing out of
that Far Eastern background; the sublime faith of thousands of college
men and women who are giving their lives because they believe that
savages and barbarians, such as I have described in this Negrito; Do
have that spark of the Divine in their souls; faith that Christian
civilization, and Christian education; and a Christian God, may awaken
that spark.
And, indeed many a proof do they have of this miracle! Only the other
day from an American School, a girl from darkest Africa graduated as a
Phi Beta Kappa honor scholar. Bishop William A. Taylor picked up this
girl as a naked child in the jungles of Africa less than a quarter of a
century ago!