Closely associated with the motives to enter the mission field
are a man’s religious convictions. Those earlier missionaries were
conspicuous for their lively sense of peril for impenitent souls.
Dr. House had a spiritual sensitiveness which shared this feeling
to the full. Frequent lamentation is to be found in his journal for
the certain perdition of ones with whom he had been acquainted, and
who died without an evidence of accepting the Christian faith. This
was not merely a professional attitude towards the heathen. Upon
news of the death of an old school mate he exclaims:
“Oh, did he die safely! What would I not give to be assured
he did. But oh, I tremble. Procrastination thou art the thief
of time, the murderer of souls. And conscience reproaches me
with having too long postponed the sending to him that letter
on the subject of the claims of personal religion, a draught
of which has for years been lying in my portfolio. It might,
under the blessing of the Holy One, have done him good—at
any rate it was my duty, my privilege to invite him, to urge
him to walk with me towards heaven. I have sinned. I have
been unfaithful.”
When a Siamese lad who had been connected with the mission for a
few months was suddenly carried off by the cholera, the anguish
of the doctor brought him to tears of self-reproach, not because
his skill had failed but because he had not been more insistent in
urging the gospel upon the boy.
At this distance of time one can see that the failure of some of
the Siamese to be persuaded was due to a want of concatenation in
the heathen mind between the physical facts already familiar to
them but not comprehended, and the spiritual truths of this new
religion. Behind the sublime faith of the missionary there was a
rigidity of logic which failed to take these mental difficulties
into account; as for instance when a young priest proposed this
dilemma: “Who was the mother of Jesus? Mary. Who made Mary? God.
Was Jesus Christ God? Yes. But if Jesus Christ was God, how could
He make Mary his mother before He Himself was born?” Turning from
the disputant, the doctor declined to discuss the problem because
he thought the man was caviling.
At one period the doctor entertained a vivid expectation of the
culmination of the Christian dispensation at an early date. He had
enough of the mystical in his religious nature to look for signs.
Thus he writes in view of the conditions of Europe in 1848:
“All Europe, every kingdom has felt the shock of the
political earthquake in France. Kingdoms, principalities and
powers tremble. These are signs that herald the near approach
of the Coming One. The day of the world’s redemption surely
draweth nigh.”
And again two years later he writes to Dr. D. B. McCartee at Ningpo:
“Surely the world must needs wait for but few of the signs,
that are to herald His coming, to be fulfilled. ‘Wars and
rumors of wars,’ earthquake and pestilence and famine, the
‘running to and fro,’ the gospel preached for a witness
in every nation—what signs of the ‘ends drawing nigh’
is left unfulfilled in our day—unless it be that a few
countries (central Africa, New Guinea, etc.) remain still
unevangelised. The last of God’s elect, however, may be
born—nay, the messenger who is to call him, in Providence
may have started on his errand; and who knows but that
privilege is for you or me.”
But that type of speculation has its own antidote, viz., time. As
his years drew out their number, the visions of youth gave way to
the dreams of old men; and in reviewing what had been achieved
and what remained to be accomplished the doctor displaced these
speculations with the simple faith that the Lord would come again
in His own time, but at a time unrevealed to men. It needs to be
remembered that Dr. House had been trained in medicine, not in
theology. Whatever may have been illogical in his tenets, there was
in his heart the profound conviction not only that Jesus Christ was
the only Saviour of the world, but that the Siamese would accept
the Christian religion, if only they could be induced to examine
fairly its claims.