An experience of my own in connection with the Kiang-peh famine
in China illustrates the situation on most mission fields
to-day. Tarrying in Chinkiang for a few days before proceeding
up the canal, I saw considerable of the refugee camp outside
the city wall. Altho one of the smaller camps, this one held
perhaps forty thousand refugees from up country, all living on
the bare and frozen ground, and the most comfortable of them
having only an improvised hut of straw matting to shelter them.
The tide of relief had not yet begun to flow from America and
Europe. Moved by compassion for the suffering ones, Mrs. John
W. Paxton made daily rounds to administer what medical relief
was possible. One day I accompanied her, and she translated
the words of the people. The commonest complaint we heard that
morning from these starving Chinese was that they had lost their
appetites! On their faces was the unmistakable famine pallor;
hunger had driven them hither from their homes--yet they had
no taste for food! The tragedy of it was overwhelming. They
had no appetite, because they had reached the last stages of
starvation, and were dying. They did not want food, for the very
reason that they needed it so badly. Heathendom does not want
the gospel, because it needs it. Starving for the bread of life,
it yet protests no desire for this supreme boon. Heathendom
does not desire Christianity for the very reason that it is
heathendom.--WILLIAM T. ELLIS, “Men and Missions.”
(1374)
=Heathenism Shattered=--See MIRACLES, EVIDENTIAL VALUE OF.