BEARING THE MARKS by Editor

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Mar 23, 1904

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 30, No. 12.

BEARING THE MARKS.

By Editor

THE editor of the Gospel in all Lands publishes the following extract from a letter written by a Wesleyan missionary in India:—

Our Bengal missionaries are much encouraged by the success which is being seen in the work among the Santals, an aboriginal race largely found in our Bankura field. For many years we were unable to do more than barely to keep the work in existence, for lack of men and means. We have now entered upon a more hopeful condition of things. We have a village work of an excellent kind, and a growing community of people, who have been brought out of darkness into light. They are in all stages of development as Christians, and some have not yet got very far, but they have turned from the worship of dumb idols and shadowy demons to serve the living God. There is one village which was a notorious haunt of evil and violent men, which has become quite changed in character as the result of the work. We have a mud church at Kuldea, where the congregation sit on the floor. The other day, as we knelt in prayer, I noticed a double line of scars on either side of the back of one of our members. To the uninitiated this would not have revealed much, but it taught me that this man, now bowing humbly at the foot of the cross, had, on nine separate occasions, swung aloft, suspended on two hooks inserted in his flesh, in order to propitiate some imaginary demon god. As we rose from our knees, I said, "Ojob, what do all those marks mean on your back?" These marks were once his glory, and I expected to find that even now he was rather proud of them. But the man was confused with shame, and covered with self-reproach that ever he had been so enslaved by superstition as to lead him to thus abuse his manhood and dishonor his God. This shame was to me an evident token of a change deep and real, wrought in him by the Spirit of God.

When a disciple of Christ is obliged to bear the marks of his devotion to the religion he professes, there is no reason of his being ashamed of them. See 2 Cor. 11:24-30; Gal. 6:17.