The Lutheran Pioneer St. Louis — 1932, Page 46

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46

THE LUTHERAN PIONEER

us Christians could not justly be made. What
thoughts are likely to arise in the minds of people
who have all their days been sitting in the darkness
of heathenism when they hear a missionary speak
of salvation in Christ for all men? It might be
well for us to hear some of these express their
thoughts.

A Christian woman of Foochow, China, when in
England, visited a cathedral. Noticing the date
upon the oldest part of the building, she exclaimed :
What! Do you mean to say that you were Chris-
tians all these years and you never told us?” Is it
any wonder she asked the question?

John Eliot, the Apostle to the Indians, was asked
by an Indian medicine-man how it happened that
the English, though they had been in the country
for over twenty-five years, had neglected to instruct
the Indians in what they claimed to be the truth
revealed by God. He said: “Had you done it
sooner, we might have known much of God by this
time, and much sin might have been prevented; but
now most of us have grown old in sin.” A hundred
years later the Indians in New Jersey said some-
thing similar to David Brainerd: “Why did not
those good people send you to teach us before,
while we had our land down by the seaside? If
they had sent you then, we should likely have heard
you and turned Christians.”

Another hundred years later another Indian
chief told a Methodist missionary who was preach-
ing to his tribe: “I am chief of a numerous people,
and I wish them to be instructed. We have heard
that our brothers who are near the white settle-
ments have received the Great Word. We have
heard that the Great Spirit has told the white man
to send the Great Word to all His children; why
does he not send it to us? I have been looking
many moons down the river to see the missionary’s
canoe, but it has not come.”

Here is what an old woman of Hawaii told a
missionary: “Why didn’t the missionaries come
before? These hands are stained with the blood of
twelve children, and not one of my flesh remains
to-day to rejoice at hearing the glad tidings of
Jesus, the Savior.”

This is the complaint of a Hottentot woman:
“What pity *tis, what sin ’tis, that you have had
that heavenly bread for so many years and have
held it for yourselves and have not given one little
_ bit, one crumb, to the poor heathen! ‘There are so
"many millions of heathen, and you have so much
bread; and you could depend upon it you should

not have less because you gave; but the Lord Jesus
would give His blessing, and you would have the.
more.”

“Young man,” said a gray-haired man of South
America to a missionary, “young man, tell me, what
was your father doing that my father died and never
knew that there was such a book as the Bible? You
say that in your land you have had the Bible for
many generations. Why did they not have mercy
on us? How is it that we are only now hearing of
this Book?”

In a meeting held on one of the South Sea
Islands an old native addressed the missionary who
was present thus: “There is one thing I want to
ask: Can it be that the Christian people in England
have had this Gospel of peace for many long years
and have never sent it to us till now? Oh, that they
had sent it sooner! Had they sent it sooner,
I should not to-day be solitary, sad-hearted, mourn-
ing my murdered wife and children. Oh, that they
had sent it sooner!”

When the Bible was first taken to the Fiji
Islanders, they asked: “How long have you had this
book? Why did you not bring it to us before?”

When Kapiolani, Queen of the Hawaiian Islands,
was told that some of the heathen still remaining
on the islands had sacrificed a little boy to their
idol, she cried out, weeping, “Oh, why did the Chris--
tians not come sooner and teach us better things?”

The first convert to Christianity on Martha’s.
Vineyard, an island of the south coast of Massa-.
chusetts, was the Indian chief Tawenquatuck. After
he had embraced Christianity, he told his pastor that
he wondered that the English should have been
thirty years in the country before they tried to tell.
the Indians about Jesus and His salvation.

Miss Mary Whately, the daughter of ‘the cele-
brated Archbishop Whately of Dublin, Ircland, re-
lates that one day, while she was speaking to some
Turkish women in a harem, one of the women, who
had been listening to Miss Whately’s relation of the
Gospel-story, exclaimed in an eager tone of voice,
“Oh, why was I never told of this before ?”

To Miss Maria West, a missionary worker among
the Armenians, an aged woman moaned out as she
listened to the words of life, “Why didn’t you come
before? Why didn’t you come before? It is too.
late for me to learn the way!” And when this
same Miss West was making ready to return to.
America, another woman of Armenia exclaimed::
“Qh, don’t go; stay longer and teach us!” And
then she added: “Why didn’t the missionaries come