A COUNTRY TRIP, 1934

A Missionary Life:
Rev. J. Wesley Day
China, Malaysia, Indonesia

Side Trip: Arrival in China, 1933

Landing at the metropolis of Shanghai, I walked the first night into the narrow lanes of the Chinese city. I found a slum, dirty, miseable, with huge old etenements againste small alleys that only the briefeset noon-sun could reach. Yellow faces, made more yellow with dirt, crowded the dirty lanes in a city struggle for existence. Every human problem seemed in Shanghai waiting for solution. The difficulty of it made the statement of an ocean traveler who did business with the chinese seem plausible: "The only way to help these people would be to wipe them all out and start again."

But the next day a Chinese friend took me to see the city. he showed me the institutions where men live out their lives in bgringing new visions of life and new faith in those visions which see a new people and even a new society in these same slums of Shanghai. I found that Christian institutions were strong in this city, and that they were among the most powerful forces that saved the city from self-destruction.

Soon with headquarters at school in Peiping, I began to meet the village people. These, who form the largest of China's many millions, are uniformly poor -- in one of the richest countries of the world. Despite their awful poverty they smile often, give the beset of life to their little children -- and are kind to strangers.

"Why are your people so poor?" I have asked Chinese friends. "It is because where the government is strong, often it taxes the people till they break, and where the government is weak, bandits come and take what they will. Where famine is bad and food is scarce, greedy ones horde their food and people starve."

And a foreigner adds" Ancestor reverence has done its part in impoverishing the people. Each man must have boy children to honor his spirit after he dies. Mad propogation is followed by mad competition for the few things necessary to live. How can a people be rich if they are too many for the land?

"But whaqt of your religion," I ask of the non-Christian Chinese. As in America many answers come back, but among them the voice of old superstitious China: "We have many Gods" -- and the opposite retort of disillusioned youth," -- and we don't believe in any of them."

The first Chinese worshipped one God -- the God of Heaven. But soon they left this most important worship to the emperor, and except for state occasions, forgot Him. When the laste "Son of Heaven" lost his throne, even this poor worship of the God of Heaven vanished.

To-day China as a nation is in all kinds of chaos. The old order of things under the Emperors is gone, no new order of things has yet really taken its place. It is the logical opportunity to bring Christ to a people whose need is great. Of course there are difficulties.

Older, experienced missionaries speak of the troubles of the present and advise the newcomer, "Do not expect sudden fruit from the seeds you sow. If you reap the harvest where others have sown and cultivated be glad, but be not proud. If the work you do seems swept away by chaos or revolution, do not give up; the chinese are not an easy people to wsin to a vision of Christ. Day by day as we lived with these people, preaching to them, ministering to them, loving them, we often thought our time was barren -- but when we look back upon such years we find that god had blest our work. You who are young in His service, give much and expect little, or better yet, give all and expect nothing from men, and God will reward you richly."

J. W. Day, Methodist Protestant Mission, Kalgan, Chahar, China
Printed in The Missionary Record, Board of Missions of the Methodist Protestant Church, February 1934, p. 23