p. 683 | OUR WORK IN INDIA by W. A. Spicer

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Oct 23, 1900

OUR WORK IN INDIA.

By W. A. Spicer

WORD has recently come that friends in England and America are sending contributions for famine relief. Through the influence of our board, I suppose, we have also had placed at our disposal one thousand dollars of the Americo-Indian famine fund. When I heard of the collections being made for us, I corresponded with Brother Ellery Robinson, who is in Bombay now, to see if he could take a trip to the famine districts and see if there was anything we could do independently to help any who otherwise would be left unaided. The famine district proper is about a thousand miles from Calcutta, and two or three hundred from Bombay.

Last week Brother Robinson visited several stations in the district. I hope he will be able to send you a report of his trip, though, as he writes me, it was the same dreary sight of famine scenes that all have been made acquainted with by photographs and descriptions. He writes that the upper-caste people seem to get on, and it is the low-castes that are suffering most. The wrecks of humanity are gathered about the relief stations and works. The greatest mortality has been from disease; and often when epidemics have broken out, the people, always more or less unmanageable, have flown in all directions, spreading disease, and dying unattended in the jungle and country roads.

Brother Robinson’s trip seems to have confirmed him in the view we have before had from the information obtainable, that the most effective way to use our funds at present is to turn them over to those on the grounds who have permanent stations, and a knowledge of the situation. To attempt relief work with a small amount of money in a country where we have no permanent work, and with practically no workers, would be useless. With all the ingenuity of the East to get the better of people, multitudes who might get on without relief are ready to take advantage of the general distress. It is not merely to give, but to give intelligently, that is required. Some large contractors have complained that the government relief camps and the general distribution have drawn away labor from their works, and thus disturbed the labor market. Such things are inevitable, and no doubt these successive famines will educate the people more and more to depend upon the government to feed and care for them. But the only thing to do when millions are on the verge of starvation is to help them to live, a task in which one of the difficult things is to secure the real co-operation of the sufferers themselves.

We will, therefore, so far as we know now, turn over money sent us to those who are on the grounds. I have given orders for specified amounts to be sent to several mission stations, and our friends may be assured that we will put the money where we believe it will be properly spent. Some have sent us money for general relief purposes. These amounts we have left free to use anywhere, and in India on all sides famine conditions practically exist in isolated cases all the time. The hurt of India is grievous, and its wound incurable. But when money is sent us marked “famine relief,” we do not feel free to use it save in those districts from which the reports have come that led to the sending of the money, or in actual famine territory elsewhere if rain fails in districts where we are working. I know that some money sent for famine relief in India is used in general relief. One missionary told me that prices were higher, and so help was being given to persons about the mission. But unless friends who contribute give directions that we can use such contributions wherever we see need, we cannot divert them.

It is a fact that the use of money as a means of influence is common in India. There is a general impression among the heathen that missions are so anxious for converts that they are willing to spend money freely to draw them. The idea is common that the man who “joins” does a society a favor that should be rewarded. This idea is cultivated by some mission methods, beginning even with infancy. We have had agents of a mission school try to get little girls of from six to ten years of age to leave our school and go to the other by the offer of toys, etc. And parents have been deceived, being told that the other school was under the same management as ours. With all this rivalry to get the people, we have nothing to do, and no little time and strength have we spent in trying to get people to understand that we work for a different object altogether. But the principle is so dimly apprehended that I am sure many have thought that, in spite of our proclamations to the contrary, we are anxious for converts to our society, and some have tried in ingenious ways to get in, and have gone off rather wrathful. But I think that even they have had a sort of respect for our methods. I am told that some among the native mission communities about Calcutta call ours a “virgin mission,” and say that we will be all right if we do not get corrupted by association with other missions. Whether this regard can stand the test of a consistent refusal to compromise, remains to be seen. We must work on different principles from those so much in evidence in these parts, or nothing can save us from being weighted down with the awful burden that other societies are carrying, to which the greater part of their money and strength are devoted, and that, too, with results that we would call unsatisfactory.

The other day a leading missionary organ said that some thought the ideal of a self-reliant, independent native church or community in India was five hundred years off. As things go, I should put it further off than that, if the world were to be continued. But that which they regard as the far-off ideal we regard as the first and most elementary step in the gospel, and we do not propose to take the second step till the first is learned. But of course the crowds will never come our way. We cannot make Christians. We cannot spend money to hold communities to us that are not held by the bonds of the gospel. We can only preach the word, and we know it has power to make Christians out of the Indian people who believe it.

Our first work is manifestly to go through India with the message, by the living preacher and the literature. Most naturally, as we have begun, the work will go first to the English and English-speaking mixed classes. This is the providential channel running all over the country, along which the stream of truth may flow. From this channel the influence will go out more or less to the native communities on all sides; and workers having the languages may be developed, who can work for the people in the vernaculars. We must do this work; it has been the burden laid upon every worker who has been in India, I think. But we have been so few, and with sickness and death to contend with, we have obtained but a foothold. In order to get the best results, and train workers in our methods, we need experienced help that can give time to language study, and can go out with native laborers to engage in the home work. The new wine cannot be put in the old bottles. I believe we shall yet get some of our best workers from the heathen communities. The most progressive example of a native Seventh-day Adventist I have seen yet is a convert direct to the message from Hinduism. The Christian community is so full of caste and practically heathen ideas, nurtured by the methods of compromise adopted, that it seems generally like a Lazarus, wakened from the dead, but still bound about with graveclothes, with none to loose him and let him go. But many in the midst of these communities are waiting for us to give them the word, and they will gladly receive it. It must be so.

I believe, in our interest to tell how rapidly the truth is going, that we sometimes overdo the matter. The deep interest in the work sometimes leads to talking about its progress in so enthusiastic a vein that the impression might be conveyed that we are doing a big work in these Eastern countries. That idea may easily lead to delay in doing more. If we get a man in a seaport town to giving away literature, in our enthusiasm we almost feel that the truth has been given to all the lands that the ships visit. We read of the threefold belt of our missions around the earth. Good! Let the earth be belted many times around. But where is India, for instance, in that belting of the earth with our missions? Aside from our medical workers, who are confined to institution work, and the zenana Bible workers, who find their field in Calcutta, and several native helpers, there are four or five men of us in the field in India, some of us tied pretty closely to the places where we are, too. We have tried to “scatter out,” as best we could. But imagine all North and South America, with the present population doubled, and then “scatter” about in it four or five men with their families, and two Bible workers, and fancy if you would like to hear enthusiastic references to the great work being done. We will not despise the day of small things; and all things have a beginning. We know that the brethren love to see the work go abroad, and also that the money given to advance it comes by sacrifice. In spending it I often see the vision of hands made

rough with toil and homes denied of comforts in order that the money may come. God bless those hands and homes! We never appreciated the royal grace of such hands so much as in a land where work is often less honorable than begging, and where nice, clean work like that of preaching or teaching is at a premium with some who scorn to do the kind of work that we sometimes do ourselves without a thought of anything unusual. We have had occasion to tell such that we know where the money comes from, and shall not spend a penny that we can help, in hiring persons who look upon mission work as a business profession. It is astonishing how often preaching or teaching the gospel is looked upon as a thing to do if a person can readily find no other work. We shall go slow, and wait for the Lord to do things. If we try to do them ourselves, we shall make the same mistakes that others have made.

More money and workers will be sent abroad if we do not look upon the foreign work as something aside, something to spend the surplus upon. That is the way with other denominations. They have their work at home, churches, pastorates, and institutions, and count upon the interest in missions to lead to special contributions to carry on the good work abroad. That is practically the way we do. Maybe it is the only practical way; for we know the home work must be built up and well officered as a basis from which to work. But really we wait and wait in entering these great fields, till revolution and political upheaval (as now in China) make the way most difficult, feeling that we must first see the home field covered, and the work well officered. Why is not the work abroad just as much the work of a home Conference as its “own” work? It is, I know, in interest and sympathy, but we do not belt the world abroad with stations as we do at home. Not till the gospel is preached in all the world will the Lord come. Then the sooner the message is carried abroad, the sooner will the Lord come in America. The foreign work is the home work, and may the Lord hasten the day when it will be more practically regarded as such. Yet we know the interest of the brethren, and realize that there are many sides to look at. Only remember that the law of perspective makes the distant object look small.

W. A. SPICER.