How did you begin work among the savages—by preaching, visiting, or what procedure?
We started our mission work in the Polynesian Islands, the Cook Islands, and the Society Islands without any public effort whatever, only going from house to house and praying with one person and another. We won many souls. Here is the way we worked: Some person would be sick. We would tell him that he was using the wrong food, and ask him to let us bring him something better. Then we would pray for him, and he would get well. That story would go all over the town. I would find another sick person, and offer to give him treatments, which would help him. Then we would have another circle of friendly interest spreading out from that man.
Perhaps I would find a blind man. I would take him a bunch of flowers, and another circle was started. So we worked without attempting to teach anything at first about our distinctive truths, such as the state of the dead or keeping the Sabbath. People began to say that some wonderful people were coming around, that they had never had such visiting. There was one poor woman who had not been visited by her own church in eighteen years. We happened to visit her in this way, and prayed with her. She came out to our meetings, and she and her family are in the work today.
How do you lead them to worship God and obey His law, when they could not read Bibles if they had them? How do you persuade them to accept the "foreigner's" gospel?
We begin by teaching them about God,—who He is, His name, where they got this mysterious life. We teach them that God is their Father. Everything they see around them brings the gospel to them. We preach the gospel through what they can see, so they can understand. The ten commandments mean nothing to them at first. So we tell them about the One who loves them because He brings the sun up every morning, the moon every month, who never sleeps nor slumbers, who causes their food to grow while they are sleeping; the One who knows just what they like to eat, who puts this taste in this and that in that. We say: "He is the One to worship. Won't you come along now, and thank Him for it?" And they do; every morning and evening they thank God.
I believe that the convincing power of the gospel is not with us, but with the Holy Spirit. If we try by our ways and our ability to thrust the truth into their minds, we are attempting to take the place of the Holy Spirit. I have learned that to give Him the honor of doing the work is the successful way. We find that when the Lord has told the natives not to do certain things, those things are not done. I think the danger of our methods of preaching lies in our not accepting the Holy Spirit's presence and His responsibility. So we go on following old methods, and we are not successful.
We get these people to discard their gods, and to worship the true God only, and to worship Him on His day. And they put away their many wives. We talk it over together, and show them that God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and two wives nor Adam and three wives. Generally the young people learn this as they read the Bible.
When we get the people to understand what reading is, we place the ten commandments on the blackboard, and we translate little by little as we go along. They are interested in that. It is something wonderful to them.
We also teach the natives what we might term our more complicated truths, such as the sanctuary, the change of the Sabbath, etc. It is not long before the young people are able to grasp the essentials of these truths. With the help of a blackboard we teach them that God told His people long ago to make a church or sanctuary, as we picture it. We describe the furniture, the table of showbread, the seven-branched candlestick, the incense, the altar, the ark, and so on. They begin to see that all these are symbols of Christ, that they all represent Him.
We must use tact. Often young men and women fresh from college are very decided before they come out as recruits, as to what they are going to do. One young man came out determined that he was going to teach the natives quicker than we were doing. We had always been careful in giving them their own way until they followed the better way themselves. Our mission effort had to be demonstrated to the native people by facts of truth. Well, this young man came, and he got out his penknife, and went to these native boys who had just come from heathen homes, and were wearing around their necks the charms which had been put there by their parents and witch doctors. The boys did not dare to take them off. They were still afraid of the old people. To take them off was against their law of propriety. And we did not encourage them to do that either, at that stage; we never encouraged the young people to go contrary to the practices of their elders until they did it of their own accord. I saw this young man cutting off this charm and that charm. He said, "I will soon get rid of them." Well, I was afraid. I said, "There is going to be trouble over this thing. We are going to lose this mission,"—and we did. More than one mission has been destroyed by prematurely interfering with things like that.
I remember one instance of a mission started by another church (we put a mission there afterward on the same site) among very rough people, very degraded and wild. The missionary got the mission started all right; then after a day or two he went down to the place where they kept their idols and the heads of their deceased chiefs. Now to them those chiefs are alive, they are spirits. They put the skulls on an altar of unhewn stone (they have brought down from ancient times some ideas of worship). That place is taboo; no one must touch it. As they pass along they put their native money there to please the spirits. This missionary saw the natives doing that, and he decided to hurry things up. He took an old head, and threw it down the hill, then threw the money down after it, so it all went rolling down the hill. No savage would stand for that, nor would any white man, either. It was just as if someone had gone to the grave of your mother, dug the bones out, and thrown them around. The natives came and tore the mission church to pieces and pitched it down the hill, too. They wouldn't permit another mission to enter for some years.
Edgware, Middlesex, England.
