China by A. C. Selmon

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Feb 14, 1907

China

By A. C. Selmon

SIANG-CHENG.—These are surely history-making times. As I read my Literary Digest from week to week, it is a marvel to see how prophecy is fulfilling. We see the old established churches—Methodist, Presbyterian, and others—repudiating the faith of their fathers, and outlining their creeds as different from the Bible as Catholicism is from the truth. And England has told Russia she may take Constantinople when she desires to do so. How can our people see these things happening before their eyes, without being stirred to action? It means the Lord's coming is near at hand.

The summer is now past, and we are having fine fall weather; and we thank our Father that we have had good health all summer. We are doing more work now than we have been able to do at any time since we came to China.

We shall be glad for the day when we can have two families located at each station. It would be a great help in our work. For instance: I am very anxious to make a trip up through the north and northeast of China, and get acquainted with the field, so we can make preparations for carrying the work into that section. But as it is now, I can not leave my station, as Mrs. Selmon can not stay alone for so long; although several times she has had to remain alone here, forty miles from any foreigners, for two and three weeks at a time, when I had to be away. I was compelled to go away last spring for two weeks. It was just before that big scare about the uprising. When I went, I knew nothing of it, but while in Hankow, I heard of it, and I saw the missionaries coming in from their inland stations, and the Chinese people fleeing to the walled cities. Since that experience, I have felt very loath to go and leave her here alone.

I am glad to report a better outlook for the work here than at any time previous. I now have two men, who I am sure have experienced a real conversion, and every day I am teaching them the Bible. I have a regular course of study for them. One is a good preacher, and the other has not been with me long, but he can present the gospel very well. I also have a doorkeeper—an old man of sixty—who is a convert. He is learning to read the Bible at this late date. He never went to school a day in early life; but since he has been with me, he has learned to read a good portion of John's Gospel. Mrs. Selmon has a woman fifty years old, who is also a real believer in the gospel, and as I am writing this, Mrs. Selmon is in the next room, teaching her to read our Chinese “Gospel Primer.”

There is a host of false workers among the native church-members. Our work has been hindered for these two years by such persons. It has only been of late, since we have learned the language better, and know more of the characteristics of the people, that we have been able to rid our camp of these Achans. And since we have done so, we have seen the Lord's blessing in a way we did not see it before. It is quality, not quantity, that counts. When I consider how little we have done in these three years we have been in China, I would surely be discouraged were it not for such texts as Isa. 17:6 and 24:13: There shall be left gleanings, “as the shaking of an olive-tree, two or three berries in the top of the uppermost bough, four or five in the outmost fruitful branches.” It surely is so in this land.

Our people at home read the reports of the other missions,—how they have hundreds coming into the church at one time,—and they are inclined to think that our work does not show the results that it should. If they could be here on the field, and see what these hundreds of converts are like, they might think differently. It is not the number of names on the church record that counts, but it is the number that will go through these perilous times, and find entrance into the kingdom. A. C. SELMON.