the children to be placed in the care of some relative or in one of the homes for missionaries' children that friends have provided, and for the wife to remain with her husband. All the considerations of the missionary call are supposed to apply to her as well as to him. She, too, knew before she went to the field that sooner or later this very question would probably arise. Her husband and the missionary work need her as much as her children, and her consecration to both husband and work were prior to the coming of children. The lot of the solitary husband on the foreign field is almost as bad as the lot of children separated from parents in America. But how can we criticise any mother who feels that she must choose her children in preference to husband and mission work? The agonies of such a choice are too sacred for others to presume to decide that question. Each husband and wife must settle it for themselves in the secret of their closets before God. Whichever alternative is chosen will probably be well-nigh unbearable. There is, too, the distress which every sensitive mind feels in looking upon suffering that one is unable to relieve. Sir William Hunter said that there are a hundred millions of people in India who never know the sensation of a full stomach. An equally great number in China live so near starvation that a drought or a flood precipitates an appalling famine. All over Asia, one sees disease and bodily injury so untended, or what is worse, mistended, that the resultant condition is as dreadful as it is intolerable. Dr. John G. Kerr of Canton was so overcome by the sufferings of the neglected insane in that great city that he could not endure them, and when he could not get help from America, he started an asylum at his own risk. Mrs. A. T. Mills of Chefoo felt driven to the same course by the pitiful condition of deaf-mute children. Heathenism is grievously hard on the poor and the sick and the crippled, while the woes of woman in maternity are awful beyond description. Yet, amid such daily scenes, the missionary must live. Then there is the mental suffering which comes to any pureminded man or woman in constant contact with the most debasing forms of sin. Most Asiatics have no sense of wrong regarding many of the matters that we have been taught to regard as evil. They are untruthful and immoral. The first chapter of the Epistle to the Romans is still almost a literal description of heathenism. Its society is utterly rotten, and nowhere else in all Asia is it more licentious than in Japan, which is lauded as the most intelligent and advanced of all Asiatic nations. We do not forget that there is immorality in America, but here it is compelled to lurk in secret places. It is opposed not only by the churches, but by civil law and by public sentiment. In Asia, vice is public and shameless, enshrined in the very temples. We saw the filthiest representations of it in the great Lama Temple in the capital of China. India, which boasts of its "ancient civilization," makes its most sacred places literally reek with vice. The missionary often finds his own motives grossly misjudged by hostile priests and prurient people. The typical heathen scoffs at the idea that the missionaries come to him for an unselfish purpose. In many lands, a single man is often misunderstood; a single woman is nearly always misunderstood. Heathen customs do not provide for the pure unmarried woman, and charges are freely circulated, and sometimes placarded on walls or buildings, in ways that are most trying. The soul in such an atmosphere feels as if it would suffocate. The pressure of abnormal conditions tends to debilitation. They set nerves on edge and expose to diseases, mental as well as physical. "Many of the missionary's heaviest burdens," observes Lawrence, "are summed up in the one word, whose height and breadth and length and depth none knows so well as he, that word exile. It is not merely a physical exile from home and country and all their interests; it is not only an intellectual exile from all that would feed and stimulate the mind; it is yet more-a spiritual exile from the guidance, the instruc tion, the correction, from the support, the fellowship, the communion of the saints and the Church at home. It is an exile as when a man is lowered with a candle into foul places, where the noxious gases threaten to put out his light. Yet he must explore it all and find some way to drain off the refuse and let in the sweet air and sun to do their own cleansing work. The missionary is not only torn away from those social bonds which sustain, or even almost compose, our mental, moral and spiritual life, but he is forced into closest relations with heathenism, whose evils he abhors, whose power and fascinations, too, he dreads." Another phase of the real strain of missionary life is the spiritual burden. To look upon myriads of human beings who are bearing life's loads unaided and meeting life's sorrows unhelped, to offer them the assistance that they need for time and for eternity, and to have the offer fall upon deaf ears -this is a grievous thing. One may stand on the slopes of Tai-shan, the sacred mountain of north China, and look upon almost innumerable villages whose inhabitants do not know that God loves them and that Christ came into the world to save them. The thought of the dull, plodding poverty and wretchedness of those lives, unilluminated by a single ray of hope, gives one an oppressive feeling of what it is to be "without God in the world." Sorrowful scenes rise to the vision of one who has journeyed through non-Christian lands. The superstitious Koreans toss a stone to the foot of a wayside tree or tie a rag to a branch, in the hope that they may be able to dodge past while the demon of the tree is satisfying his curiosity as to what the stone or rag is. A Hindu woman approaches the hideous, blood-stained image of the goddess Kali, offers a sacrificial lamb and beats her head upon the hard pavement, in the hope that the goddess will reward her by granting her heart's desire for her child. In the capital of enlightened Japan, a suffering woman pitifully rubs her cancerous breast against the corresponding part of a bronze statue in the Temple of Asakusa, in the pathetic belief that she may thus be cured of her malady. In Canton, the metropolis of China, another woman is in tears because the bit of paper, which a priest has shaken out of a box in return for her widow's mite, reads bad fortune instead of good. As one recalls these and similar scenes all over Asia, he enters more tenderly into the woe of the Master when He stood on the slope of the Mount of Olives and wept over Jerusalem, stretching out His hands towards the people and crying in the bitterness of His anguish: "Ye will not come unto Me, that ye might have life!" "The travail of His soul ! " ' What does it mean; what tears and agonies and sore cryings? "None of the ransomed ever knew, How dark were the waters crossed, Verily, Nor how dark was the night that the Lord passed through, Nothing in the missionary life is harder than this for the man or the woman who has gone to the foreign field from true missionary motives. It is akin to the strain that broke Christ's heart in three years; for it was this that killed Him, and not the nails or the spear. 1 John 5:40. Isaiah 53: II. XVIII THE SPIRIT OF THE MISSIONARY E join the missionary in protesting against the impression that he is essentially different from other W good men. There is no halo about his head. He is not a saint on a pedestal. He does not stand with clasped hands and uplifted eyes, gazing rapturously into heaven. We have met more than a thousand missionaries, and we have been impressed by the fact that they are neither angels nor ascetics, but able, sensible and devoted Christians workers. The typical missionary is more like a high-grade Christian business man of the homeland than a professional cleric. He is preeminently a man of affairs. He makes no pathetic plea for sympathy for himself, but he wants coöperation in his work and to have people at home feel that the work is theirs as well as his. He unhesitatingly accepts the exhortation of Kipling: "Go to your work and be strong, halting not in your ways, The woman who becomes his wife is like him in the strength and purity of purpose and character. The world does not contain nobler, sweeter women than the wives of missionaries. More sensitively organized than the men, they feel more keenly the loneliness and privations of missionary life. But their courage seldom falters. Indeed, they often nerve their husbands to more resolute effort. When nine years of toil in Bechuana had failed to produce any visible result, Dr. Moffett might have been discouraged if it had not been for his heroic |