Untitled article by Editor

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Jan 1, 1894

FROM FOO-CHOW, CHINA.

By Editor

[We have received two letters from Rev. Nathan Sites, a Methodist missionary at Foo-Chow, and from one of these we take the following. Extracts from the second letter will be given at another time.]

The city and suburbs of Foo-Chow comprise over half a million souls, and furnish a field for the workers of three Protestant missions. Our work includes day schools, boarding schools, the Anglo-Chinese College, the School of Theology, and our great printing press. The statistical results of these various departments do not show as markedly as in some other departments, but on the work at large their effects are incalculable for good. Evidence of progress is manifest in the multitude of children freely coming to our Sunday schools.

Rev. J. H. Worley and Pastor Hu Bo Mi started an afternoon Sunday school in our East Street city chapel, and the children came by scores, remaining through the hour to study Scripture texts and listen to the explanation of God's word.

"The poor have the gospel preached unto them," and it has sometimes seemed as if only they were willing to accept Christ. The wealthy and literary classes have ever been the secret leaders of opposition and persecution against our work. But thanks be unto God, the strong wall of conservatism with which they have encircled themselves seems weakening and crumbling. We have now over twenty first-degree graduates as full members of the church, besides a large number of probationers. At the late great triennial examination for second degree, not less than twenty Christian students were among the competitors. Such a thing was never before known in the history of this old nation.

Here at Foo-Chow a first-degree literary graduate, the late Dr. Ling Seng Nguong, a native physician of great renown, left idolatry to serve God. He was the head of a large family, with children and grandchildren, and servants, male and female, in all thirty or more persons, all living in one large residence built some ten years ago. Dr. Ling was formerly very devout in his worship of idols, and so revered them that if at any time he saw one neglected or uncared for, he took it home and cared for it, and in this way he gradually collected about a hundred images.

At one time during the flood he saw the limbless trunk of an idol floating on the swollen waters. He secured it, and found upon the back two characters indicating its name. He took it home and had workmen repair it, putting on new limbs, and had made for it a little shrine of finest hard wood, carved. A few months ago, when the true God became his one and only object of devotion, he presented this same idol, with its shrine and all complete, to my daughter, who in return sent him a large, handsomely bound Bible. He said of it, "If I were offered all the gold of famous California, and all the wealth of my own land beside, it would not purchase this book of me."

But not long after he had cared for the flood-driven idol, his wife took sick and died. Then his eldest son died; and in the despair of her hopeless grief this son's wife hung herself. Very soon afterward the second son also died; and, hearing of his death, the young girl to whom he was betrothed committed suicide. Beside himself with grief, the doctor angrily cast out almost all the images for which he had so reverently cared, but which had not prevented calamity from befalling his household.

A friend said to him not long after, "I have found what you need, better than any medicine to heal your heart and cure your body." With this he handed him a copy of Dr. Allen's Shanghai paper News of the World. This proved a source of intense interest, not only for the news it contained, but because of the light it gave regarding another religion, of which he had never heard.

He at once bought a Bible and began careful study of it. His home has since been a place of weekly public worship, and himself an interested learner. His failing health had of late kept him much at home, and he never was within a Christian church. But in his own home he accepted Christ. His dying testimony was, "All peace within."

But "he being dead yet speaketh," and not only are all his large family now committed to Christ, but from unexpected sources far and near some reports of his work. While healing others of physical ailments he had for years past, ever since his own first study of the Bible, been pointing his patients to Christ, the soul Physician. His fourth son, also a literary graduate, is now teaching in our School of Theology, and proving himself an earnest follower of Jesus Christ.