Santalia and the Santals- by W. A. BARLOW

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Mar 26, 1908

Santalia and the Santals—

By W. A. BARLOW

No. 9

Preaching the Gospel

W. A. BARLOW

PREACHING the gospel, teaching the young, healing the sick,—these form the back-bone, or rather, if we use the terms in a broad sense, the whole body of mission work, all the world over. Preaching the gospel is not so much the first as the whole duty of the missionary; but it is a gospel to be preached in deed as well as in word, a gospel which aims at the material as well as the spiritual good of man, and seeks not only to enlighten his mental darkness, but also to relieve his physical pain. Educational and medical work are not adjuncts to, but parts of, a true evangelistic mission. The missionary of Christ, if animated by the spirit of his Master, will seek, in the words of John Wesley, “to do all the good he can, in all the ways he can, to all the people he can.”

Confronted by the dead wall of indifference, ignorance, and superstition, the missionary may be tempted at times to believe that little can be effected by preaching alone, that the soil must first be turned up by the educational plow before it will receive the seed of the Word. A man will listen intently to the most earnest preaching and individual pleading, and when you wait for his response, it is to beg a little tobacco, or to ask how much you paid for your boots.

We were once preaching to a crowd in a Santal village, when one of them, more intelligent than the others, interrupted us with the remark that it was of no use to preach about religion to them; they were so poor that they could think of nothing except how to get food. We turned to our Santali New Testament and read to him the words of Christ: “Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.” “Well, that way may be your way,” was the reply, “but it is different with us. First we want a few fowls; then having got fowls, we would like pigs as well; and when we get pigs, we want goats and sheep; and when we get them, we want cows; and even when we get cows, we are not content till we have buffaloes.” Even this degree of self-consciousness is altogether exceptional; the Santal, as a rule, is so utterly worldly as to be unaware of his worldliness. Still, the God who could raise from the stones children to Abraham, is pleased to save men by the foolishness of preaching; and if the evangelist among the Santals may seldom find an intelligent audience, it is still more rare to meet a hostile one. “The barbarous people” show us “no little kindness,” almost invariably producing from the nearest but a string-bed for the preacher to sit on, and sometimes even offering him food from their scanty store. Nor has the simple preaching of the gospel, without other preparation or attraction, been without fruit. One of our oldest and most faithful Christians owes his conversion, under God, to the preaching of an unknown stranger who once passed through his village. “Duties are ours, events are God’s,” says Samuel Rutherford; and our duty is as clear as anything in the Word of God, to tell the people the old, old story of the redeeming love of Christ. Here we must tell it simply, tell it slowly, and tell it often.

Educational Work

Schools must form an integral part of our missionary propaganda, not only because education is a good thing in itself, and apart from mission work it is almost unknown among the Santals, but also because schools are absolutely necessary for the training of mission workers. Santals must be reached by Santals. The training of these workers for mission work must begin with the A B C. What Dr. Johnson said of the Scotchman is true of the Santal, that a great deal may be made of him if he is caught young. Thus at each mission station there should be a training-school for boys (and if possible, for girls, but they should be quite separate from each other—a boy’s school at one station, and a girls’ school at another). The schools should be open for boarders and day scholars, with the object of winning souls to God and training them for his service and glory. The result has amply justified the wisdom of this policy

throughout the Santal missions in general.

Medical Missionary Work

Then a missionary at work in a remote district and among poor people must be a medical missionary to the best of his ability. If he refuses to give help to the sick and the dying, they will attribute it not to his inability, but to his unwillingness to help them; and wherever he goes, he will meet with demands for medical relief, which, in common humanity, to say nothing of Christian charity, he must do something to supply. The people themselves settle the question as to medical work being made a part of our missionary efforts; what we have to settle is whether the help we give them is to be efficient or inefficient.

The Lord’s command is to heal the sick, not merely to drug them; and until we have done for them the utmost that modern methods of hygienic treatments will enable us to do, we have not fulfilled this duty. Among many, however, the idea still prevails that in a land like India, which is under British rule, the medical relief afforded by the government must be sufficient for the needs of the people. No one who is familiar with village life in any part of India is under this delusion. The government institutions are chiefly confined to cities and towns, and even there they by no means meet the need; for in Calcutta itself it has been shown that more than half of those who die receive absolutely no medical care of any kind during their illness. Ninety per cent of the population live in the villages. The inspector-general of hospitals for Bengal has recently stated that in order to supply every town or rural area having a population of three thousand with a dispensary, there would need to be over forty times as many of these institutions as there are at present. In districts like the Santal District, the condition of destitution as regards medical relief is one that those who live in more highly favored conditions can hardly imagine. “Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he will send forth laborers into his harvest.” “It is high time to awake out of sleep.” Matt. 9:3, 8; Rom. 13:11.

Simultala, E. I. R., India.