Dying Beneath the Gods in Whom They Have Trusted
MRS. J. B. COCHRAN wrote the following touching scene, during the recent famine in China:— "The temple of the city god, right under our windows, a stone's throw from our veranda, raises its rugged walls and picturesque, curved roofs with as stanch a face to the world as it has shown for all these long centuries past; and the old city god himself sits stolidly on his throne and smiles calmly and benignly down, untouched, though his people, hundreds of them, are starving and dying before his face, and his temple has become indeed 'the city of dreadful night.' "There are huddled there in that old temple, homeless and starving, professional beggars, with their masses of tatters, and conventional cracked bowl and staff; people from the city whose homes have been chopped up and sold for kindling-wood to buy bread; decent country people, with their little wailing children, who have wandered in, in a forlorn hope, rather than sit quietly and starve at home; parents who have seen their children, one after the other, starve and die; children left behind when the parents, having given them their last bite, staggered and fell; they were all there, and the old idol smiles benignly down on all these his children. "A few nights ago a family—there were five left—gave up hope, and in one corner of this 'city of dreadful night' the father strangled his three children, and then he and the mother hanged themselves. A strange sight this for the city god to smile upon when the sun struggled in and showed it the next morning. "Two days ago, kind Mr. Liu, going about with bread, said to Mr. Chen, 'We will wait till about ten o'clock in the morning; then all who are able will have crawled out to beg.' At ten o'clock, when they entered the temple, they found twenty-eight men, women, and little children too weak to move, lying prostrate, perforce, before the placid face of their god. The two Christians, sick with pity, gave them food; but when they came again next morning, six, too far gone to take the food even when it came, had died.14"Each morning, long before daylight, these two good men take out what money we can all give (for we ourselves being foreigners and marked men, dare not give a cent, for fear of mobs) and distribute it in coin and food to those who are, as Mr. Liu says, 'about to die.' As these two Christians enter the temple, the gaunt, wretched figures rise up from all the shadows, and crowd and snatch like crazy things for the food they are trying to give out. Once Mr. Liu held out a bit of bean-cake to a man who stood swaying as he waited; but the crowd cried out, 'Too late,' as the man, his hand still outstretched, staggered and fell dead. " 'They die there,' said Mr. Liu, 'almost every night. Sometimes only one or two, sometimes, if the night has been bitterly cold, many more, frozen or starved to death.' " 'O God, pity them! these dwellers in 'the city of dreadful night.' For hundreds, yes, hundreds of thousands of them are starving and dying before their idol's benign smiling face and placidly folded hands.'"