A Remarkable Conversion

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D.C. · Nov 7, 1907

A Remarkable Conversion

Told by a Missionary in China

A MISSIONARY in China was once preparing a cup of tea in his tent, when a native of the district, one of the literati, but notoriously wicked—indeed a leader in wickedness, who kept a den of infamy near by which was the resort of the abandoned of both sexes—ventured into the tent. After a few moments’ conversation about the weather, and such commonplaces, the missionary approached him on the matters of the soul in some simple way, and was at once met by the resistance that comes from agnosticism. This flagrant Chinese sinner fell back upon our ignorance of everything outside the realm of matter and daily experience, and particularly objected to believing anything he could not see and understand.

The missionary met him at the very threshold of his own objection, and pointing to the little tea-kettle on the brazier just beginning to emit steam, said: “Well, now there is a simple thing you see, but don’t understand. I take some spirits, or charcoal, and a match—all cold and without a flame. I strike the cold match on a cold surface, and it blazes up. It sets the spirits or the charcoal burning. The flame strikes the cold surface of the kettle, and the heat passes in some way through the kettle bottom, and comes in contact with the water, and, in some way, sets the water moving more and more rapidly, until it is as we say ‘boiling.’ What was cold becomes hot, until the liquid changes to vapor and comes out at the spout, first invisible, then becomes visible as a white cloud of steam, and presently changes back to water, and falls in drops upon the earth. You see all this, but not one step in it all can even you, a literary man, explain. When you can tell me how matter that is cold and without flame, develops fire, light, and heat; how what is outside passes through metal and gets inside; how what was liquid becomes a floating vapor; how the visible becomes invisible and then visible again; how the water becomes vapor, and the vapor again becomes water; how what was cold becomes hot, and what is hot becomes cold,—I will undertake to explain the mystery of any fact declared in this Book,” laying his hand on a copy of the Chinese New Testament.

The Chinese scholar had, of course, nothing to say, and naturally diverted the current of conversation to something else; and, as he was about to leave, the missionary, picking up a neatly bound copy of the Gospel according to John, in Chinese, said: “I will give you this, if you will agree, before you to go to bed to-night, to read just the first three chapters.” Half playfully the man accepted the gift and the conditions, and, taking the book with him, went off to his den.

The book and the promise were alike forgotten until he had gone to bed, and then the thought occurred to him, “I promised the foreign devil I would read three chapters in that book before I went to bed, and he’ll ask me the next time he sees me if I have done it. Well, that promise is easily fulfilled.” So he lighted his little lamp, and, still lying in bed, began to read. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” That book did not read as any other he had ever read, and his curiosity was awakened. “In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in the darkness; and the darkness has not overpowered it. . . . That was the true light that illumines every man by its coming into the world.”

He read on, irresistibly compelled, as he read, to notice the novelty of the teaching in this gospel story. He read those words spoken by John the Baptist: “Behold the Lamb of God, which beareth away the sin of the world.” Who can read that and not stop to think? He read on to the third chapter, and then he found one of the Jewish literati in conversation with Jesus, and stumbling over the mystery of the new birth from above,—just as he had refused to accept what he could not understand,—and he observed how our Lord answered the Pharisee very much as the missionary had answered him: “Here is the wind. Did you ever see it? Yet you see its effects as it bends the branches of trees and sways the fields of grain. You know not whence it comes, or whither it goes—how it comes to blow, and how it comes to die away and stop blowing—how anything so soft and pliable as the wind lifts the waves, and tears up deeply rooted trees: So is every one that is born of the Spirit. You see the proofs and results of the Spirit’s working, but never the Spirit himself. You can not tell how he works, whence he comes, or whither he goes.” And the learned blasphemer and panderer to vice remembered what the missionary had said about the water, and fire, and steam in the tea-kettle, and could not but say to himself: “There is certainly something very like, in what he said and in what this Jesus teacher said to this man of the Pharisees. You see the fire burn and the kettle boil, but you can not tell why or how. And you see the Spirit make men new as if born again, but you can not tell how.” And he read on: “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” That was wonderful. God giving his own Son, and sinners having only to accept God’s gift by believing!

A little farther on he read how light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light because their deeds are evil. And he felt that that was a true description of himself. He did not want to see any light; it made too clear his own evil doing, and he would run away from any truth that showed him his own bad heart and life. Then, as he finished his promised task and came to the end of that third chapter, he read those wonderful words: “He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life,” and if that was true, he had only to believe in this Jesus and have this strange gift of everlasting life.

Incredible as it may seem, he got out of bed, upon his knees, and asked for salvation. He became, simply by reading that gospel story, and without any man to guide him, a true believer; and not only abandoned his old life and all its companions and vices, but turned that den of infamy into a place of prayer. The gate of hell became a gate of heaven.—The Missionary Review of the World.