My Missionary Life in Persia With Some Remarks on Liking One's Job

I

AMONG the most persistent of my early dreams was that of being a missionary. I wanted to be a missionary before it occurred to me that I had any particular doctrine to communicate or manner of life to recommend. Indeed I now perceive that my call was more of Nature than of Grace.

I wanted to be a missionary because I longed to go on missionary journeys. The call of the wild, the lure of the unknown, the fascination of terrestrial mystery takes many forms. It is all a part of the romance of Geography, which has survived even the invention of maps.

When one is eleven and going on twelve, there comes a great longing to go to the Antipodes, to visit No Man’s Land, to wander through forsaken cities, to climb lonely towers, and to look out through

In different generations this demand has been variously met. The institutions of civilization, besides their primary objects, have had the secondary function of satisfying the youthful desire to go into a far country, a desire not of the Prodigal alone. Patriotism, Religion, Commerce, each has its finger-post pointing to the unknown.

To the boy of Tyre and Sidon, commerce, with the early morning dew of piracy yet upon it, offered a sufficient lure. To go into trade did not mean to clerk in a dry-goods store. It meant to sail away over the blue Midland waters to ‘ the cloudy cliffs down which the dark Iberians come.’

The Roman youth, when he would visit Parthia and Numidia and Caledonia, had the way made easy for him. All he had to do was to join the legions, and then the path of duty and the path of glory coincided. There was the promise of many a fine trip.

In the Middle Ages there were Crusades and pilgrimages to holy shrines, — capital ways of seeing the world. Chaucer’s knight had ‘ridden as well in Christendom as Hethenesse.’ Or if one could not be a knight-errant he could be a saint-errant. He could journey far with never a penny to pay.

But if one lived on Paint Creek in Southern Ohio, the access to the world of romance was more difficult. It seemed a long way from Paint Creek to the lands old in story. It was a far cry to

So far as one’s chances of seeing these places are concerned, they might as well be in another world.

But out of the distant wonderlands one traveler returned. He was a missionary. He had sailed strange seas, he had seen famous cities, and had got back safely to Ohio. He had crossed deserts in caravans, and had endured perils of robbers. I resolved to be a missionary.

The world was all before me where to choose my place of work. There were islands in the South Seas still awaiting the spiritual explorer. Moffat and Livingstone had found Africa interesting. There were still places in it where an enterprising missionary could get lost, and to find him would be an exciting adventure.

But at last I settled down to the firm conviction that I was destined to be a missionary in Persia. Other fields might clamor for my services, but Persia was my first love, and to that I would be faithful. The very names of its cities and its streams were music to my ears. They awakened what I felt was best in my nature. It was in connection with them that I first experienced the luxury of doing good. How I came to choose Persia for my field of labor is clearer to me now than it was at the time. There are many influences which affect us, but the influence of the imagination, which is the strongest of all, is the one we least recognize. It forms the atmosphere that we breathe and that sustains us when we know it not.

In looking back I perceive that the period when I determined to be a missionary to Persia coincided with that in which my chief literary enthusiasm was Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh.

I do not think that I seriously considered that the juvenile delight in the melodies of Lalla Rookh was in itself a sufficient missionary motive. But having resolved to be a missionary somewhere, this determined the place. The missionary reports were rather dry reading, and with all their fullness of detail did not give me the information which I most needed. Lalla Rookh was the book which most interested me. It directed my newly awakened zeal into the right channel. It showed me the paths of pleasantness in which I would gladly walk.

How could it be otherwise? Did not my heart kindle at the opening lines: —

Was not that delightful Province of the Sun good missionary ground? Should I reject a call to such a sphere of usefulness simply because it was not unmixed with pleasure? Duty might some time call me to preach on the banks of that mysterious river which

I should be prepared for such a call. Nor should I shrink if in the course of my work I should be summoned to

And I should find my way through

I was unaccustomed to such scenes and unfamiliar with the etiquette involved, but doubtless I should learn. In Persia one must do as the Persians do.

And I could not forget that

Now and then there would be a journey on the water.

I should not allow myself to become too narrow. When my home work was well in hand, I should visit the neighboring regions. For

It might be found advisable to establish a station in Cashmere.

The prose introduction and the copious notes gave much information which was useful in arranging one’s itinerary. In the heat of the day one could rest‘under the shade of a banyan tree from which the view opened upon a glade covered with antelopes,’ or in one of those hidden, embowered spots described by one from the Isles of the West as ‘ places of melancholy, delight, and safety, where all the company around was wild peacocks and turtledoves.’ Such spots would be excellent places for the writing of sermons. In this way one could get just the kind of illustrations that the Persians would appreciate. And the flowers of rhetoric would all be perfectly natural.

To be commissioned by the Board to a station in Persia was certainly the very romance of missionarying.

Lalla Rookh, and behind that the Arabian Nights, predisposed my mind to regard this field favorably.

No journey would be too long. I would willingly pass on a swift dromedary along the mysterious borderlands where

I would then plunge boldly into the interior and follow the caravan route

Planning these missionary journeys was a pleasant way of doing one’s duty. Wordsworth’s excursion through the vales of Westmoreland led him to feel how exquisitely the mind to the external world is fitted, and how exquisitely too the external world is fitted to the mind.

The same impressions came from my missionary excursions in Persia. There was a perfect adaptation of the environment to the mind. Indeed, the mind had it all its own way. Persia was exquisitely fitted to my conception of it. There was no contradiction of sinners. The sinners formed a picturesque background. Their presence harmonized with the scene. They were the tawny desert around my little spiritual oasis.

My tastes were simple. All I required of Nature was what she could easily furnish: a desert, a palm tree, a little river, some roses and some nightingales. Then the congregation would seat itself and I would begin to expound my favorite text: ‘The lines have fallen unto us in pleasant places.’ Being like myself enthusiastic Persians, they would all agree to this. After we were in the right frame of mind we would proceed to a consideration of some of our sins which prevented us from fully enjoying these pleasant places. It would then be time for our frugal meal of dates.

Even to this day I cannot read Emerson’s Saadi without relapsing into the mood of my missionary life in Persia.

One does not feel like an intruder. For

I pass through the grove of palms and find my way among the crowds of whirling dervishes without feeling the desire to trip any of them up, and come to where Saadi sits in the sun.

It is no place for dogmatic controversy. Long ago the Muse had whispered to him, —

To sit in the sun with Saadi and get his point of view would be worth a long missionary journey.

As time went on, the pictures of Lalla Rookh were retouched, but the original coloring was not obliterated. I preferred old-fashioned travelers who had emotions on the banks of the Tigris which were different from those that came on the banks of the Mississippi. There were periods when my missionary zeal grew weak, but when it returned it was always to Persia. This continued even to the time when I entered the unromantic purlieus of the Theological Seminary.

Fuller, in his Worthies of England, tells us that when Sir Thomas More published his Utopia ‘many at the reading thereof took it for the real truth,’ and ‘there were here among us sundry good men and learned divines very desirous to bring the people to the faith of Christ, whose manners they did like so well.’

It was the same motive which inspired these would-be missionaries to Utopia which inspired me.

At last, feeling that I could no longer lead a double life, I called a family council and declared my intention of offering my services to the Board. I grew eloquent in praise of my chosen field, and of the people ‘whose manners I did like so well.’

There seemed an especial fitness in making some slight return to my adopted country from which I had already received so much pleasure.

Then it was that my grandmother, whose tenacity of opinion was inherited from a line of Covenanting ancestors, registered her veto. ‘ You must not go as missionary to Persia, for if you do the Persians will convert you.’

I do not think that my grandmother feared that I would become a Mohammedan, but she did fear that I would develop oriental traits, alien to the habit of mind of the Chillicothe Presbytery. What I took to be a missionary call she looked upon as a kind of apostasy. Tried by the severe standards of disinterested virtue, I was found wanting. The call to Persia lacked the element of complete self-abnegation. To be sure, I was not attracted by the loaves and fishes, but deserts and nightingales and the enchantment of distance might be equally deceptive.

So it turned out that when the time came, instead of going to Persia I went to Kansas. I found Kansas interesting also, though in a different way.

II

I should not ask presumably busy people to listen to these shadowy recollections, were it not that they suggest some questions of practical importance. Was my grandmother right in thinking that my pleasure in Persia was likely to be a detriment to my usefulness? Was I less likely to do good to the Persians because I thought well of them to begin with? And would it have been a waste of time if, after a term of years, I had partly converted the Persians and the Persians had partly converted me? May there not be a profitable reciprocity in spiritual influence?

In attemptin to answer such questions we encounter the prejudice which exists among the more moral and intellectual classes against mixed motives. We usually prefer to exhibit a virtue in as abstract and dehumanized a form as possible. We strip it of any agreeable circumstances and accidents, and by a process of ethical analysis reduce it to its simplest terms. Because Virtue has often been mistaken for Pleasure, we insist that it shall not be seen in its company. There seems something especially meritorious in the more unpleasing manifestations of duty, as then we are free from any doubts as to its being the genuine article. If the duty happens not to be disagreeable, we try to make it appear so. Thus a patriotic citizen, being nominated for an office of dignity, is careful to inform his constituents that he accepts at the sacrifice of his personal desires, which are all for a strictly private life.

In the Middle Ages some of the saints invented an ingenious device for reconciling politeness with asceticism. When they were invited to dinner they ate what was set before them, but if the viands threatened to be delicious, they slyly sprinkled them with ashes.

Biographers of missionaries, philanthropists, reformers, and all kinds of altruists, seem to think it necessary to do something like this. They represent their heroes as doing all sorts of disagreeable things which they do not want to do. They set up one single dignified motive, and severely eliminate all the little subsidiary motives that grow around it. The one virtue is a upas-tree, making a desert where it grows. Every effort is made to conceal the fact that the good deed has been done from mixed motives. Virtue must be presented in a highly abstract form without any pleasant embellishments.

The ‘strong man rejoicing to run a race1 is praised for his disinterested virtue. ‘Brave fellow. How noble he is in his self-forgetting zeal! There he goes through all the heat and dust, when he might be here sitting in a rocking-chair.’

The sympathetic and tearful admirer would feel that you were attempting to pull his hero down from the high moral pedestal if you were to say that rocking in a chair was an acquired taste which the strong man does not as yet possess. He prefers to run. He has an excess of animal spirits which must be worked off some way. He rejoices to run, partly because he is alive, and partly because he has a worthy goal presented to him.

So far as I have been able to observe, such mixed motives are the ones that take men furthest. Altruism is no exception to the general rule that a man does good work only when he likes his job.

In private life, and in the pursuit of gain or reputation, people endure all sorts of hardships without incurring any particular sympathy. It is taken for granted that they like what they are doing. The football player does n’t mind his incidental bruises. The fisherman rejoices in his tribulations, and no one thinks it strange.

Why should not the altruist get the same sportsmanlike pleasure out of the incidents of his work? Because he must work hard with an uncertainty about the results, is no reason why he should not yield to all the allurements and fascinations which belong to the enterprise upon which he has entered.

It happens that the capacity for enjoying himself is one upon which his opportunity to do good to others depends. Human nature is so constituted that it demands that duty be mixed with pleasure.

We cannot abide an altruist who does not enjoy himself, and who has not a sportsmanlike spirit. We resent his attempt to monopolize brotherlykindness. If he be without imagination he will insist on working for us instead of with us. He will not admit us to a partnership in good works. He insists on doing all the self-sacrifice and have us take the ignominious part of passive recipients of his goodness. He confers a benefit on us with an air that says, ‘ I have come to do you good. I have no selfish gratification in what I am doing for you. But a sense of duty has triumphed over my personal inclination.’

We detest him heartily, but for no other reason than that he is not enjoying himself while he is doing us a kindness. It is as if an anxious host should refuse to sit down at the table with his guests. He likes to see them eat, but he won’t eat with them. They are not likely to pardon this breach of hospitality.

Reciprocity is the very essence of human intercourse, and only the churlish person fails to realize that there must be reciprocity in pleasure. You must not throw your cast-off pleasures to another as you would throw a bone to a dog. The dog is a generous creature and will accept the bone with no criticism of the unmannerly way in which it is offered. But kindness to persons is not so simple as kindness to animals. You must be kind to your neighbor in such a way as not to interfere with his plans for being kind to you.

Altruism is a game two must play at, and it must be played cheerfully. You must not try to be Altruist all the time, you must take your turn being the Other. If it is your duty to make him happy, it is equally his duty to make you happy. You must give him the opportunity. If you have renounced ‘the miserable aims that end in self,’ it is praiseworthy in him to do the same. Encourage him to have worthy aims that end in you.

It is wonderful how sensitive we all are in this respect. We refuse to be helped except by people who like to do it, and who profess to be having the time of their lives when assisting us. ‘We should be most happy to serve you if you will allow us.’ If they say it as if they meant it, we allow them to lend a hand; if we suspect them of insincerity we respectfully decline their offer, — unless we are paupers, and then we don’t care how they feel.

This universal preference which all self-respecting people have for being helped by cheerful friends, rather than by conscientious benefactors, is a great limitation to all philanthropic effort. Unless we heartily enjoy ourselves, other people will not allow us to improve their minds or their morals.

The great helpers of mankind have been men who were shrewd enough to see this condition and frankly to accept it. They have turned their duty into pleasure, and then claimed for themselves only the inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness. If in this pursuit they incidentally helped their neighbors, they hoped that this would not prejudice any one against them.

Chaucer’s Clerk of Oxenforde was a solemn-looking person, and not very congenial to the more full-blooded members of the company. But they doubtless thought better of him when they learned that ‘gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche.’ After all, those old books were not his penance but his recreation. This made him more comprehensible to the stout miller and the honest ploughman. They liked him better because he had his little pleasures, though they were of a queer kind.

A disciple came to Confucius and with that admirable directness in asking questions characteristic of Chinamen, inquired, ‘Master, are you a sage?’ Confucius answered, ‘No, I am not a sage, I am only one who learns without satiety, and who teaches without getting tired.’

In other words, he was a healthyminded person who enjoyed his intellectual victuals and who liked to share them with his friends. He was naturally given to intellectual conviviality, and had been lucky enough to be able to indulge these tastes.

Those who are not weary in well-doing are those who make the freest use of their natural aptitudes. They do not allow their consciences to be overburdened by doing all the work. It is ‘spelled’ by some of the less austere faculties. The results are more satisfactory than if there had been no opportunity for moral relaxation.

There was John Wesley. His Journal, with its record of indefatigable labor, is one of the cheeriest books in the language. What a rare good time he had! When he was eighty-seven he could say, ‘ I do not remember to have felt lowness of spirits for a quarter of an hour since I was born.’ For more than sixty years this indefatigable pleasure-seeker had been doing as he pleased. Up every day in time to preach at five o’clock in the morning; then over the hills or through the pleasant lanes to preach again at about the time lazy citizens were ready for breakfast; off again, on horseback or by chaise or in a lumbering stage-coach, for more preaching to vast crowds of sinners—just the kind of sinners he liked to preach to. Now and then facing a mob, or being wet through in a thunderstorm, or stopping to get information in regard to some old ruin. Between sermons he refreshed his mind with all sorts and conditions of books. On the pleasant road to Chatham he reads Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered. On the road to Aberdeen he loses himself delightedly in the misty sublimities of Ossian. Orlando Furioso is good Saturday reading. The eager octogenarian confesses that ‘Astolpho’s shield and horn and voyage to the moon, the lance that unhorses every one, the allpenetrating sword, and I know not how many impenetrable helmets and shields’ are rather too much for his sober English imagination. Still, they afford an agreeable interlude in his missionary journeys. Sterne’s Sentimental Journey he finds very absurd, and ‘notable chiefly for its unlikeness to all the world beside.’ Still, it is not unpleasant to read.

‘Riding to Newcastle, I finished the tenth Iliad of Homer. What a vein of piety runs through his whole work in spite of his Pagan prejudices.’

On his way to preach to a congregation of Christians for whose salvation he was solicitous, he refreshed his mind by reading the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, of whose salvation he had no doubt. ‘What a strange Emperor! What a strange Heathen!’

Preaching to a congregation of dour Scotsmen he urged as the first duty to cultivate a better disposition ‘I preached from I Cor. XIII, 1-2, in utter defiance of their common saying: “ He is a good man though he has bad tempers.” “Nay,” said I, “if he has bad tempers he is no more a good man than the Devil is a good angel.” ’

I should not go so far as Wesley. The good man with a bad temper is a recognized variety. We must accept him as a stubborn fact. His joyless efforts to rectify the world are genuine, though they create in the heart of the natural man an unfortunate prejudice against rectitude.

But we can say that such a good man’s effort would be much more effective if his disposition were pleasanter.

Jonathan Edwards went as missionary to the Indians in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, at a time when Stockbridge was not so pleasant a place of residence as it is now. It was very self-sacrificing in him. Still our sympathy goes out chiefly to the Indians.

Dr. Grenfell, on the other hand, falls short of Edwards’s ideal of disinterested virtue, for he frankly admits that he likes Labrador and its ways. When he returns, instead of melting the hearts of the Ladies’ Auxiliary by the story of his hardships, he fires the minds of their growing boys with the desire to run away and be missionaries themselves. Yet the Labrador fishermen get more out of it than they would if Dr. Grenfell did not have such a good time. When we read Borrow’s Bible in Spain we feel that Borrow would have gone to Spain any way, even if there had been no Bibles to distribute. Nevertheless his natural affinity for gypsies, muleteers, and picturesque vagabonds of all sorts, enabled him to carry the Bible into out-of-the-way places which would never have been dreamed of by a zealous person of sedentary habits.

Those whose sense of duty has been strongest have often acknowledged their indebtedness to other contributory motives. When that able and pious New England Puritan, Thomas Hooker, felt that it was his duty to remove his congregation from the banks of the Charles River, and found a new colony on the Connecticut, he presented the question of duty to the General Court. ‘The matter,’ says Governor Winthrop, ‘ was debated divers days and many reasons were alleged pro and con.’

But the decisive consideration was presented last, namely, ‘The strong bent of their spirits to remove thither.’ This consideration finally carried the day in spite of the argument that ‘the removing of a candlestick is a great judgment which is to be avoided.’

There is always something to be said in favor of the strong bent of the spirit, whether it tends toward Connecticut or Persia.