Advice to Young Missionaries.
Rev. Henry Jessup, D.D., who was nearly fifty years a missionary in Syria, gives the following bits of wise counsel:— When Christ says, “Go into all the world and preach the Gospel,” He also says, “Lo, I am with you alway.” Our Master calls us to tread no path that He has not Himself already trod or that He is not ready to tread with us. I gladly bear testimony to the fact that Jesus Christ our Lord is a faithful promiser. He is with us always, and He never will leave us. 1. Your success as missionaries will depend on your likeness to Christ. A Christlike character is always lovable. Heathen, Mohammedans, and other non-Christian people know the difference between a Christlike man and a selfish, haughty, unsympathizing man. If men love the messenger, they will learn to love the message. If a herald of the truth wishes to win men’s minds, let him first win their hearts. The logic of controversial argument never convinced men half so much as the godly lives of Christian believers. 2. Be courteous to all. The Golden Rule is the key to true courtesy. Treat the people as you wish to be treated. A Christian should be a model of courtesy, as were Christ and St. Paul. The late Rev. Gerald F. Dale, Jr., was styled by Dr. A. A. Hodge, of Princeton, “the model scholar, the model Christian, and the model gentleman of Princeton.” He won his way to the hearts of the townsmen and peasantry of Syria as he would have done to the polished people of his native Philadelphia. Be assured that no gifts, graces, or talents are superfluous on mission fields. 3. Be willing to go where you are sent. Neither the Board of Missions nor the mission to which you are going will be likely to designate you to a post where you can not do good work for the Master. But be willing to go anywhere. 4. Let us go forth as hopeful laborers. A class once graduated in Cambridge consisting of three men, “a mystic, a skeptic, and a dyspeptic.” The missionary work does not want pessimists who, like cuttlefish, darken all the waters around them with inky blackness. Mr. Moody said, at the meeting of the American Board of Madison, Wis., in 1894: “Pessimists have no place in the Christian pulpit. We want hopeful men.” And we can say with equal truth, pessimists have no place in the foreign missionary work. We want hopeful men in this glorious, aggressive warfare. There is quite enough to weigh you down without carrying lead in your hat. 5. Let us go with level-headed Christian common sense. Nothing will supplant the want of this. A misplaced and misnamed “missionary” in India once wrote home to his friends that he could get on well enough but for the miserable natives, who kept crowding into his house; but he had succeeded in getting a bulldog, and hoped to keep them off. 6. Again, as you enter on your work, begin humbly. The message you bring is divine, but the messenger is human. You are a stranger in a strange land. You can not speak a word of the language. The people think that because you do not know their language you do not know anything. They pity you, and perhaps despise you. You will be wise if you gracefully accept the situation, and take the attitude of a learner, not only in language, but in social customs, business relations, and even in regard to their religion. The three years spent in language study will be no loss. If you could plunge into your work on your first arrival, knowing the language, but knowing nothing of the habits, prejudices, customs, courtesies, proprieties, religions, tenets, superstitions, and national tastes of the peoples, you would make more enemies in a month than you could unmake in years. Your blunders would be associated with you in the minds of the people, and they would give you a nickname which you could not shake off. A stranger in any land needs to walk cautiously, especially if he comes as an avowed reformer.—Missionary Review.