A GREAT MISSIONARY by John G. Woolley

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Jun 16, 1898

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 24, No. 24.

A GREAT MISSIONARY.

By John G. Woolley

A GREAT missionary is simply a straight missionary. If you will make a study of your own mother for a week, you will probably learn the lesson of it. You will observe many things which need not here be dwelt upon—some faults among the shining qualities, no doubt—but surely these:—

In her character of mother she “stands by” you. The neighbors may be down on you; the teacher may affirm that you have no sense; the doctor may advise her that she can not raise you; you may not grow; you may grow smaller; you may tax her patience; you may take all her time; the other children may repudiate you; your father may refuse to look at you; she may even wish that you had not been born; she might think it a mercy if you should be taken away. But while there is a breath of life in you, she “stays.” She will not stoop her motherhood to have the company of those who despise you or who would hinder you; she will not be driven by any torment to choose an evil thing for you because there is a greater evil threatened and the good is scarce and hard; you are Piedmont, and she is the Matterhorn.

So the great missionary sticks to the thing for which he has been sent. He never shirks; he never studies the wind; he never trains with enemies of his mission, nor modulates his message to please the indifferent; he never gets rich; he is never popular with the dominant sinners, great or small; he never abandons a series of meetings because the crowd does not “catch on;” he keeps no scrap-book of what the papers say about him.

He sees straight; he never tries to look two ways at once; his eye is single and his whole body is full of light; he sees just as well on election day as on Sunday; he carries no lantern when the sun shines; he dodges nothing; he eats no dirt; he peddles no dish-water.

Many people see more than he does, but he sees straight ahead; he is not afraid of anything in that direction. That is why he never ducks his head.

A fly has 8,000 eyes; its head is, in fact, mostly eyes. Some missionaries are built that way. It is hard to hit a fly.

When the public sentiment gets ready to stone a great missionary, it can find him; he has latitude and longitude; one knows just where to throw to hit him; he never stands edgewise to an enemy for safety. If the enemy is ahead, he meets it face to face; if behind, it has his whole breadth to aim at; if the executive committee kill him, why, then he is what the coroner calls “dead.”

A great missionary goes straight. One whose brain is mostly optic nerve is apt to see too much that he can’t understand—which makes him timid and unsteady, so that he makes crooked paths for himself.

You can’t hoe corn very well and watch the birds; and one who puts his hand to Christian Endeavor and looks back at his party or his popularity, is unfit for the kingdom.

A few straight missionaries now could shake the earth—a few men with nothing to sell, nothing to conceal, nothing to fear.

Of a hundred great race-horses, 50 were bay, 30 were chestnut, 20 were brown; no piebald ever won a great race. Amen.—John G. Woolley, in the Voice.