Editorial July 31, 1915 Issue

Ways and Means

John B. Willis

Some years ago a minister went to Swatow, China, to found a mission. He was a man of unusual forethought and believed in success, hence first of all he acquainted himself, so far as possible, with the existing facts of the situation,—with the customs, the religious beliefs, the superstitions, the prejudices, the moral standards, the hopes, and the economic conditions of the people. He studied also the methods of propaganda which other missionaries had used, and then determined upon a course which was destined to become interestingly eventful.

Instead of standing at the street corners and speaking to the passing multitudes, as others were wont to do, thus sowing the seed under circumstances most unfavorable to its growth, he gathered a number of elderly native Christian women from other missions, and in the quiet of his own home taught and counseled them. Thus equipped, he sent them out two by two into the fields and shops where the masses spend their lives in a toil that knows no vacation or Sabbath rest, so that standing by them in their work by day, or lying down with them in their simple homes at night, they might find opportunity to tell them the sweet story of the coming of the Christ-man to comfort and to save. The touch was to be made intimated, sympathetic, and as it proved, effective, and no one could visit the mission and meet these workers without gaining a new assurance of the feasibility of the world's redemption.

This method of bringing the gospel to the Chinese brings remembrance that the Master thus sent out his workers, two by two, and the idea becomes peculiarly interesting to those who through Christian Science are awakening to the fact that they are each called to inaugurate a kindred ministry, to bring not only to those immediately about them but to all peoples and all problems that spiritual truth and love which will accomplish the work outlined by Mrs. Eddy in her statement that "those who discern Christian Science will hold crime in check. They will aid in the ejection of error. They will maintain law and order, and cheerfully await the certainty of ultimate perfection" (Science and Health, p. 97). This can but mean that we are each not only to work out our own salvation, but to aid in the solution of every communal and every world problem.

Send a comment to the editors

NEXT IN THIS ISSUE

Editorial

"That which was lost"