AN INDIAN WOMAN-MINISTRY.
By L. J. Burgess
IT was in the home that the Lord designed to educate the human family before the fall of man. The changed conditions of the earth through the curse of sin have brought many changes in the course of instruction required, but the home is still the principal gateway for the entrance of the Gospel. Was it not through the influence of Jochebed the mother of Moses, and Mary the mother of Jesus, that the world has received its greatest blessings? In carrying the "present truth" to India, China, and other heathen lands, the Lord will help us to find entrance and welcome, as we knock at the door of the home. The following account by Mrs. S. M. I. Henry, may show the truth of this: "About thirty years ago the burden of this question fell heavily with the sorrows of the heathen world upon the missionary. He found himself unaccountably handicapped. There was a hindrance to the progress of the Gospel which he could not locate. In India, and China, and every heathen country, the experience was the same. A man might acknowledge the truth of the new religion, but he was, for some reason, strangely slow to embrace it. "At last this hindering cause was discovered, where it had been hidden for centuries in the harem and zenanas. The wife and mother might be a slave, but she had the power to make it very difficult for the men in her family to become Christians. She whom the missionary had never seen, whom he could never be allowed to approach, had the ability to prevent the progress of the Gospel, to make it practically fruitless. "After the discovery of the heathen mother and wife as a hindering cause, the question came to be, How was she to be reached, and changed into a helper? Every ancient custom, every hallowed thought and manner of life, seemed to have been for centuries kept busy in building a hedge about her for the very purpose of keeping her away from Christ, and of retaining her as His chief antagonist, when the day for the deliverance of the captives should fully come. "The manner in which the first little break in this wall of prejudice was effected is very suggestive. The wife of a missionary had embroidered, and at Christmas time presented to her husband, a pair of slippers. These were very much admired by a Hindu visitor, and he wished that his wife might be taught, so that she could make him a pair just like them. The missionary's wife promised to make the attempt, and, with some trepidation called upon her heathen neighbor for that purpose. She, delighted at what promised to be an agreeable change from the monotony of her life, and as glad to please her husband as a wife would naturally be, welcomed the offer. The material was purchased, and the work begun; and it was during the hours that these two sat together in that zenana over their embroidery that the Christian woman saw and seized the first opportunity of the generations to reveal Christ, the Liberator, to her enslaved sister, whose whole nature, body, soul, and spirit, was galled by the chains that bound her. And as the missionary lady opened up to the heathen woman's wondering comprehension her own happy domestic life, the starved heart that had never tasted or even dreamed of such possibilities in a home, threw herself upon the breast of her teacher, and begged, with tears, to be taught how to become a Christian, and how to make a Christian home. "It was not long thereafter before the husband came to his missionary brother to be instructed in the same things; and from that home made new, the Gospel began to go to the homes of India." Homes for the education of women in India, preparing them to go to their shut-in sisters with the good news of the Gospel, would be blessed by the Lord in bringing light to many who are now in darkness.