THE GRATITUDE OF THE LEPERS.
By John Jackson
THE Indian Christian not infrequently appears to adopt an attitude of having, by reason of his change of faith, established a claim on his Mission for all the aid, not only in spiritual things, but in temporal things, that it can tender him. But generally speaking, our Christian lepers are singularly free from this spirit, and their appreciation of all the boons the Mission has brought them is undoubtedly sincere. This gratitude on the part of the Indian leper is no doubt due, in measure, to the striking contrast between his fate as a homeless, Hindu outcast and his condition of comfort and safety as an inmate of a Christian Asylum. Driven from the shelter of home when most in need of kindness and care; stricken with an incurable and loathsome malady which is relentlessly eating away, not only his life, but his very limbs; reckoned by his kindred as an unclean creature, on whom the curse of his gods has descended; the destitute leper represents the very lowest depth of human need. No wonder, then, that when banished from his village as a disgrace and a danger, he is welcomed into a home of hope and safety, he is grateful to those upon whom he has no claim, but who, constrained by the divine love, give him daily food and constant kindness. It is doubtless this practical embodiment of the compassion of Christ that leads so large a proportion of the inmates of the asylums to accept Christianity, so that there are now in connection with the sixty-eight stations of the Mission nearly 3,000 baptized Christian lepers. To them Christianity is more than dogma and doctrine, it is love—translated into act and fact. They can believe in a Saviour whose servants show them the only kindness they can find on earth. The home to which they have brought their breaking hearts and stricken bodies is to them a foreshadowing of the Father’s house of many mansions, and human love enables them to believe in the divine.—John Jackson.