How far away the Bible seems to us when it tells of sack-cloth
and ashes, and about Jacob and Mordecai and Isaiah, who marked
their desolation by these signs! In Korea sack-cloth is still
such a mark, and with hair unbound and their persons wrapt about
with these coarse folds of bagging they sit like Job and cry,
“Aigo, aigo.” “And the mourners go about the streets.” From the
writer’s house we look out on one of the main thoroughfares of
the city; and frequently, as the sun goes down, there comes
a procession bearing lanterns and a long line of mourners in
sack-cloth following the dead with mournful wailings. Is there
not a thought and a providence underlying the oneness of these
things with all the settings of the Scripture?
(222)
* * * * *
“Take up thy bed and walk,” seemed to the writer in his
boyhood days as a most extraordinary expression. He pictured a
four-posted bed being tugged out of a bedroom by one poor man
only just recovered of his sickness; but when he came to Korea,
he understood it all. The bed was just a little mattress spread
out on the floor of the living-room, and to roll it up and put
it away was the common act of every morning when the sleeper
awoke. Morning light and consciousness had come into the life of
the poor invalid, so he would roll up his sleeping-mat and walk
off to where it was put for the day. So, in many of the common
acts of life in Korea we were in touch with the days of our Lord
on earth.
(223)
* * * * *
Then there is the footgear or sandals. Neither China nor Japan
so markedly reflects Scripture in this respect as Korea. Here
are the strings tied over the instep, here the humble servant is
called to bow down and unloose them. As in Judea, they are never
worn indoors, but are dropt off on the entrance-mat.
(224)
* * * * *
The expression, “Girt about the breasts with a golden girdle,”
is never quite clear to a young Bible reader at home, and China
and Japan cast no special light upon it; but in Korea there
was the long white robe down to the feet, and round the breast
the embroidered girdle. It remained until after the missionary
arrived, and then in the changes of the new century the girdle
was swept away. The white robes, too, find their corresponding
part in Scripture, and the expression, “So as no fuller on
earth can whiten them,” often came to mind in the old days, when
out of the little squalid huts came forth coats that shone like
polished marble.--The above four illustrations from JAMES S.
GALE, “Korea in Transition.”
(225)