The New Apostolate of Woman
A MARKED feature of the New Acts of the Apostles is the apostolate of zvoman. From the day when Gabriel announced to that Virgin of Bethlehem her destiny as the human mother of the Son of God, woman has taken a new rank in history. Mary of Magdala, to whom first He appeared after His resurrection, was a forerunner of the thousands of her sex who should bear the good tidings of a risen Saviour. That outcast of Sychar who forgot her water-pot and hastened from the well to tell even the men of the city about the Messiah, forecast the myriad women who should forget themselves and all secular cares in the ministry to souls.
These were prophecies of woman’s work, and have been fulfilled in a startling manner in this new era. As the new age of missions moves toward the final goal, more and more does Christian womanhood come to the front. To-day, more than one-third of the entire force in the foreign field is composed of godly women. At home women’s organizations, the outgrowth of the last quarter century, have had an increase so rapid, an influence so wide, and an impulse so forceful, that no other agency compares with them in value and virtue. They have created and scattered cheap and attractive leaflets on missions, stimulated consecration of home life, and trained up a new generation of self-devoted missionaries; and, amid all the variations of values, and crises in the money market, kept up a constant advance in the scale of gifts to the Lord. To the increased activity of these women who still follow the Master and minister to Him of their substance is mainly owing the decided advance of missionary enterprise during the thirty years past.
This theme demands a separate treatment, for the field it opens is too broad to be otherwise surveyed. The bare mention of the names, only, of the holy women, single and married, who have adorned the annals of modern missions, would require much space; but to attempt even the briefest sketch of the heroines of the mission field would demand a volume. In some cases they have been wives and mothers, like those three grand women who in succession shared the work of the devoted Judson in Burma, and one of whom laid the corner-stone of Siamese missions. Others have been single women like Fidelia Fiske in Persia, Eliza Agnew in Ceylon, Mary Whately in Cairo, Matilda Rankin in Mexico, Mary Graybell in India, Clara Cushman in China.
Mary Moffat for a half century bore with her husband the yoke of toil and sacrifice among the Bechuanas. Maria Gobat for forty-five years was Samuel Gobat’s invaluable helper in Abyssinia and Malta, and finally in the bishopric of Jerusalem. Hannah Mullens, daughter of one noble missionary, was the wife of another, and has left her lasting footprints in Indian zenanas. Judith Grant spent but four years in Oroomiah, and was but twenty-five years old when she died, but her husband found that her life was the most powerful sermon ever preached in the land of Esther. The work of Mary Williams is scarcely less illustrious than that of the martyr of Erromanga. When Dorothy Jones at twenty-four years of age returned to England from the West Indies a childless widow, after a year of service among those degraded negroes, she had passed through a shipwreck whose frightful agonies had distorted her face beyond recognition, yet she could only say, ‘* I have never once regretted engaging in mission work. “Anna Hinderer spent seventeen years by the side of her beloved David, in the Yoruba country, and so captivated the women that they almost worshipped her, and so inspired heroism in her converts that they dared torture for Jesus’ sake. Rebecca Wakefield spent but three years in Zanzibar, but her heroic fight with hardship and privation, and all the foes of a hostile climate and a pagan society, won for her the crown of a courage ‘’loftier than that of Joan of Arc.” Sarah B. Capron not only took equal part in her husband’s long service in India, but after his death trained scores of Bible women for zenana work, and has now given her maturest days, in the Bible Institute at Chicago, to the training of candidates for mission work, both at home and abroad.
Out of all this illustrious company of women, in the field of missions, we take, almost at random, a few names as examples of this modern apostolate of woman.
Hannah Catharine Lacroix Mullens
Was born in India. The women of that vast peninsula were therefore doubly her sisters, and nobly did she redeem the debt of sisterhood. As a girl of twelve she was already about her ‘’ Father’s business,” teaching native girls at Bhowanipore. At nineteen she became the wife of the Rev. Joseph Mullens, of the London Missionary Society in Calcutta, and from that time forth the very roots of her being struck deep into the work of a missionary, and absorbed all her energy. Her aid in her husband’s study of Bengali, her work in the boarding-school for Hindu girls and in the Bible classes for native women, her sanctified pen, fit companion to her anointed tongue — all these are but hints of the varied and abundant service that made that life overflow with usefulness. She has sometimes been called the pioneer of zenana work; but, before her day, when Rev. John Fordyce was in India, the movement for penetrating the closed doors of Hindu homes had begun; yet Mrs. Mullens has an indisputable share in the glory of securing wider access to the exiled women of India, and gf winning them to Christ. And when, after sixteen years as a missionary’s wife, she was suddenly called up higher, at the early age of thirty-five, her last day had been spent in writing a book for the native women.
Emily Chubbuck Judson.
Long before ‘’Fanny Forester” had met her husband, her zeal for missions had kindled over the memoir of Ann Haseltine Judson; and when, in 1845, he first met her and asked for the service of her graceful pen in preparing the memoir of the second Mrs. Judson, little thought either of them that the interview would lead to marriage. The few years of her experience in Burma were crowded wth self-sacrificing service; and when in 1850 Dr. Judson’s fast failing health made a sea voyage needful, though she scarce knew how to breathe apart from him, and was herself in an apparent decline, she heroically stayed behind. Left with three children in her charge, and one of them her first-born infant of two years, and expecting within one month her second experience of maternity, she cheerfully bade her husband farewell. Three weeks after he sailed, she gave birth to her little ‘’ Charles,” and soon after laid him in his grave, little knowing that his father had made the sea his sepulchre ten days before his infant son had departed; for there were four months of terrible suspense before she knew whether her husband was alive or dead. Yet she leaned hard on Jesus, and, with a patient heroism which, for pathetic interest, is unsurpassed in the annals of missionary life,” endured as seeing Him who is invisible!”
Mary Chauner Williams.
John Williams always said that, without his wife, he knew not what he would have done. Beside all her loving, conjugal and maternal ministries, her lofty spirit made radiant even the most menial offices of cook and housemaid, and withal she was a teacher. From her the women of Raiatea learned the arts of household life, while every such lesson became a channel for higher instruction. She searched out the aged, half nude and altogether despised and neglected, placed them under proper care, and led many of them to find a new staff for their old age and a new light at life’s evening-time. The younger women she diligently taught and catechized until they were trained in the words of faith and good doctrine. Whether with her husband in his ‘’circumnavigation of charity,” or staying behind to care for interests that would suffer in their absence, she was the same unmurmuring servant and burden-bearer of the Lord: and, when seven of her babes were sleeping on the various isles of the Pacific, this handmaid of the Lord could still say,” Be it unto me, according to Thy word!” In poverty or peril, sickness or suffering, she was alike undaunted and undiscouraged. Awakened at midnight with the awful news of her husband’s tragic death at Erromanga, and while so prostrate with a paralysis of grief, that even friendly visits of sympathy were a torture, she admitted, among the first who entered that chamber of sorrow, Malietoa, the chief. He was himself overwhelmed by the loss which put all Polynesia under its pall. Frantically he appealed to her not to kill herself by indulging grief, pleading with her to live for the sake of himself and his poor people, and crying out, ‘’If you too are taken, O what shall we then do!”
Fidelia Fiske.
Born the same year that Williams sailed for the South Seas, at twenty-seven years of age this noble woman went to reproduce in the land of Esther the system of instruction which at Holyoke, Massachusetts, made Mary Lyon’s school for girls so famous. There are various types of bravery, and none more heroic than such as this refined and delicate woman displayed, as for Christ’s sake she dared the unutterable filth and countless army of vermin encountered in the huts of Oroomiah.
When in 1843 she arrived in Persia, about forty schools had been opened on those plains, but for the most part reached only the boys; and the girls’ school, that Mrs. Grant had founded five years earlier, had dragged out a half dead existence. It was for this humble daughter of Shelbourne, niece of the Syrian missionary, Pliny Fiske, to become the real pioneer of woman’s education in Persia.
God laid it on her heart, to lift up out of the horrible pit and miry clay of unspeakable degradation, Nestorian womanhood; but to do it she must herself go dovlm into the pit. She saw that to raise womanhood, she must first lift girlhood to a higher level. So she began with the daughters, and courageously took measures to gather, into a family school, a few whom she would cleanse and clothe, feed and train. She sought for six girls with whom to begin, and, while as yet she knew but one Syriac sentence, she used that to beg parents to ‘’give their daughters.” On the proposed day of opening, though fifteen day scholars offered, not one ‘’boarder” was secured. Mar-Yohanan, however, came, leading two little girls of seven and ten; and to this first “gift of daughters” additions were slowly made tmtil they numbered twenty-five — all she could then accommodate.
Thus, on foundations laid in prayers and wet with tears, was reared that New Holyoke which has been to Persia a pearl of great price. For sixteen years she carried on her apostolic work, and when illness drove her home her one wish was to get back to the land of the magi. Cancer ate at her vitals until, not yet fifty years old, she died, in 1864. Yet, while thus weary and worn, feeling this vulture gnawing at her heart, she not only pleaded ceaselessly for missions, but actually took the principalship at Holyoke, Mass., that with her dying hand she might still sow in youthful soil the seeds of missionary consecration.
Of Fidelia Fiske the venerable secretary of the American Board has said: ‘’In the structure and working of her whole nature she seemed to me the nearest approach I ever saw, in man or woman, to my ideal of our beloved Saviour as he appeared on earth.”
The work which began with the repulsive task of literally cleansing from filth and purging of vermin the very bodies of Persian girls, found its reward when, in the three years from 1844 to 1847, an outpouring so copious visited her seminary that it could be compared to nothing but the first Pentecost. All the girls above twelve years were converted, and many of them became missionaries in these Persian homes. The school was so obviously blessed in lifting women above the low level of the donkey, and ennobling that character which is the secret of all betterment of condition, that persecution only showed its worth and multiplied its supporters and so made necessary enlarged accommodations. During the closing days of Miss Fiske’s stay in Oroomiah ninety-three converted women, in one meeting, greeted her as first-fruits of a life whose motto was,” Live for Christ.”
We may well thank God that, after for centuries being kept in the background. Christian womanhood is finding its true sphere of work, and wielding its golden sceptre of influence. Missions have shown the normal status of woman in the Church and in the world; and how closely her identification with her Redeemer is also linked with family life and social life, so that. without her there can be no holy household nor reformed society. And her deep sense of infinite debt to Christ, not only for salvation, but for her redemption from her domestic and social thraldom, prompts her to undertake a mission to her degraded sisters in pagan, heathen and moslem lands, which can by no one but a Christian woman be done at all. Perhaps God suffered zenanas and harems to be locked against men so that women might the more feel His providential call for their service to their sex.
Woman’s work for woman no human gauge can measure. When Dr. Eli Smith of Syria was giving theological students his reasons why, ordinarily, a missionary should take a wife, he spoke not only of her contribution to her husband’s home comforts, and her power to shelter him from moral suspicion, but he added with earnest emphasis, that the wife often does full as effective work in the foreign field as her husband, and that nothing is needed more, as a living lesson to these degraded and ignorant idolaters and victims of vicious social surroundings, than the practical exhibition in the Christian woman herself of what the religion of Christ does for her as daughter and sister, wife and mother. The common witness of the most heroic and successful missionaries is that the holy lives and tireless labours of devoted women have been indispensable to the highest results of missions. There was a time when woman was regarded as little more than man’s helper, if not servant: but Paul wrote,” Help those zvoinen which laboured with us in the gospel,” as though they were now leaders, and the men were to go to their help!