FEASER was perplexed. Before him lay Moh’s postcard with an urgent invitation. Around him were the happy crowds gathered for the Christmas festival, including the group of newly-won Kachin who had come to take him back with them to their settlement where many more, they told him, were ready to turn to the Saviour. How he longed to go at once to the Hsiangta district, in response to Moh’s appeal! But here were duties and opportunities that could not be set aside. Was there anyone who could go in his place? Flagg was shortly to be married, and had a long journey to take in another direction. Cooke was there, it was true, having left his books and teacher at Tengyueh, to bring the mail and give what help he could. But he had been only a few months in the district and as yet knew little of Chinese and nothing at all of the Lisu language. The call to Hsiangta might lead to great things. If only Fraser could go himself! And then the thought of what it might mean to his young colleague decided him, He would ask Cooke to go, with the best Lisu he could find to accompany him, and would trust God to work through them. So the little party set out on their four days’ journey to the east and south, wondering what had led to this new development.
Moh had not given any explanation. But the truth was, it transpired later, that he himself had been doing what he could to deepen the interest of the ‘Cold Country’ Lisu, who had heard the Gospel from Fraser five years previously. Moh’s conversion at that time had been followed by steady growth in the Christian life, and he had made the most of the occasional visits of the tribesmen to the Hsiangta Market. There they loved to foregather in the pastry-cook’s shop, sure of a welcome, and eager to hear more of the One they were beginning to regard with special interest.
For the Lisu, all through that Burma borderland, had a sort of king mentality, as Fraser had already discovered. They cherished vague longings for the teacher and deliverer they expected, who would bring books in their language and good news for their people. Moh listened with no little interest to their talk of this looked-for leader, and made the most of the fact that in Lisu the name of Jesus was almost identical with that of their own tribe― Jesu ‘and Lisu’ having exactly the same tones. Jesus of the Lisu―was He not their Coming One?
But the tribesmen were undecided. Material things had more weight with them than spiritual, and it was not until Moh struck another note that the appeal went home. The photograph of Flagg and Fraser in tribal dress, taken at their first Christmas gathering in Tengyueh, had reached him. There they stood, large and lifelike, complete in every detail of Lisu attire, from turban to bare feet and leggings. Taking up the photo he handed it to his visitors.
‘Here is your Lisu king,’ he said, ‘and he has books for you and much good news.’
The tribesmen gazed in wonder. Yes, it was Fraser, some of them remembered him. But he had not been in Lisu dress when he came to their villages. Now it all looked different! Could he indeed be their Lisu king? That picture decided the matter, for after talking it all over with their people at home, they hastened back to beg Moh to write for them, asking Fraser to come at once and help them to turn Christian. But their ideas as to this turning were very hazy, as Cooke and his companions were to discover.
It was just before the Chinese New Year when the little party reached Hsiangta, and Moh was too busy in his shop to go with them to the ‘Cold Country’. An escort soon appeared from Tasiaoho however, and, under the guidance of Paul, the stalwart son of the ex-wizard, they set out for his home. At a market town on the way they stopped to pick up a store of provisions for the New Year’s feast. That was to be expected, but Cooke was concerned to see them load up with gallons and gallons of whisky, also bought and paid for. What could this mean, if they were preparing to become Christians?
Warmly received in the villages (four in number), although he was not in Lisu dress, Cooke was soon at home by the smoky fires, winning in his quiet, kindly way the confidence of his hosts. In spite of preparations for the New Year’s feast, he and his helpers had good opportunities for pressing home the importance of making a clean cut with all idolatry and demon worship, drunkenness and opium smoking, in turning to the Living God. Paul was able to speak Chinese, in which language Cooke had made some progress, so that they could talk things over to some extent.
‘Yes,’ he explained, ‘we want to turn Christian. But we must worship our ancestors once more, to send them away respectfully, and offer sacrifices to the demons, that they may not injure us. And there is this whisky―which of course we must use up.’
More and more the young missionary was distressed as he saw preparations going on for the regular idolatrous Feast. There in the middle room with its log fire on the floor, the spirit shelf was being dressed with new red paper, the incense bowls made ready and the food spread out before the ancestral scrolls and dreaded demons. Could it be that the family was about to worship as usual, with all the accompaniments that were so degrading? For Cooke and his Lisu companions knew well what it meant―the orgy of feasting and drunkenness―seeing who could eat the most fat pork and other dainties, and drink the most whisky, until men and women alike were utterly debauched. How they dreaded the dancing and singing that went with it all, and the drunken sleep that followed the night of dissipation! And all this in the home where they had had such happy hours, talking and singing of better things.
At last when all the family, old and young, gathered and went down on their knees before the spirit shelf, and began to bow and knock their foreheads on the ground in worship, Cooke was overwhelmed with grief and disappointment.
‘I sat there weeping as I watched them,’ he said to the writer, years later, ‘thinking that they were not going to turn after all.’
‘Why do you weep, teacher?’ broke in the voice of Paul, who alone had noticed his deep concern.
‘Because you are sinning against the true and God.’
‘But do you really care so much?’
‘Care? How can I but care for your poor lost souls?’
Something struck home to the young Lisu’s heart. Something opened his eyes to see, as he had not seen before Preaching had not done it. ‘We must drink the whisky we have bought,’ had been his attitude. ‘We must feed our ancestors and demons for another year, or vengeance will come upon us.’ But now―
‘Do not weep, do not weep,’ he cried. ‘We will pour out the whisky! We will truly turn, as you have taught us.’
Then and there the scene was changed. With one accord the whole family followed the lead Paul was giving. Soon the spirit shelf was torn down―the food put to other uses; the basins and incense holders smashed and all the twigs and trumpery used in vows and worship thrown on the bonfire lighted in the courtyard.
Neighbors ran in to see what was going on. Whisky flooded the pig troughs and overflowed the ground―yes, the whisky they loved above all else! Soon the pigs were reeling drunk, but the rejoicing people were sober. Neves had there been such singing, such gladness!
Paul led the way to the spirit tree [Cooke continued]―just an old stump, too big to cut down. Incense and bowls for food stood on the shelf attached to it. He broke the bowls, tore out the shelf, burning everything that could be burned. A little hut stood nearby, with incense for spirit worship. They tore it down and carried it all to the bonfire. ‘Now come to my house! Come to my house!’ the neighbors began calling.
We went with Paul, and throughout the village the same scenes were repeated.
What a day it was! ‘Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.’ God’s hour had struck, nothing could stay the incoming tide. Cooke and his Lisu lads were ‘small enough and weak enough for God to use.’ They inspired no fear, aroused no suspicion, and wherever they went the movement spread. Within the next two weeks, thirty families in that neighborhood had come out boldly for Christ; and when Cooke had to return to Tengyueh to continue his studies, the two young Lisu remained to strengthen the converts and carry on the work.
Fraser meanwhile, knowing nothing of all this, had had a similar experience among the Atsi Kachin of his own district. The welcome he received at Pangwa was a big surprise, the whole community turning out with drums and music to do him honor. The Kachin evangelists from the south had done their work so well that little more was needed to decide forty families to become Christians. Settling down among them, Fraser began at once to learn Atsi, making such progress that within a month he was preaching his first sermon in the language of this once unfriendly tribe, for which he had prayed so long.
The joy of bringing the Gospel in all its saving power to such darkened hearts helped him to bear the poverty-stricken conditions, dirt and squalor of their way of life. He found them to be a strong, independent people, harder to influence than the Lisu, but more fearless and steadfast after they became Christians. But the work and privations so told upon him that he had to take a brief respite in a not distant market town, where a dilapidated Chinese inn afforded what seemed to him, by contrast, as good as ‘a holiday at the seaside’! His graphic picture of this Chinese market with its abundance of good things (written to cheer his mother, especially) can only be glimpsed in fragmentary quotations, if space is to be given to a more important letter. Of the scenes immediately around him, he wrote:
For lodging only, including firewood and water (also an inn coverlet―ahem―if you care to use it) we pay two-pence a day each.... We borrow our pots and pans from the landlord―this is thrown in with the two-pence. The Lisu I have with me go out each morning to buy the food... Sometimes I go myself―and you might smile to see me with a basket of vegetables in one hand and a string of cash in the other, or a bit of fat pork dangling from a slip of bamboo, walking along the roughly paved street of the market between the thatched stalls of the vendors. But I take a positive delight in doing just what the Chinese do. They boil the rice first (I must learn how to do this, you know) over a gipsy fire against the wall of the inn passage. When it (the rice) is done they put the lid on and kind of roast it by the side of the fire while they boil the vegetables. The latter they first chop up with their big knives, then fry―then pour water on and boil. This method of frying and boiling makes the stuff tasty as well as well cooked. There is an angry fizh-zh-zhzh-zh when they pour on the water, and sometimes a flash in the pan.
When all the stuff is cooked they reach the bamboo table down, put the basins, bowls, chopsticks and rice pot on it. Perhaps the landlady complains that we are making her table all black by putting the rice pot down on it: if so, we go and get a piece of rough Chinese paper to put under it. I say grace in Lisu and we set to. You needn’t pity me living on ‘Chinese food’ such as you can get at a place like this: it is as delicious as it is nourishing. Flagg, who has just passed through here on his way to Tengyueh from Bhamo, said I was looking well though I have been living on native food for over three months. I am likely to go on living on it for another month or more yet too. During all this time I have not tasted foreign food of any kind―no bread, butter, porridge, milk, tea, coffee, cocoa, or sweet things, nor do I have any particular desire for them. In Lisu and Kachin villages I rather feel the lack of fruit, but down here you can get pears of a sort, persimmons, bananas, pineapples, etc., at present. I have tasted as good bananas here (seven a penny) as I have ever had at home....
It is market day today and the street is just beginning to hubbubify. You can see no less than seven races each with its own distinct language―Chinese, Shan, Palaung, Achang, Lisu, Jinghpaw Kachin, Atsi Kachin. I would make race No. 8, wouldn’t I? You can tell all of these races apart―except the two tribes of Kachin―by the dress of the women, and the women are most in evidence on these markets in this part of the world. They bring in all sorts of produce carried either in two baskets by a pole over the shoulder, or else in one on their back, dump it down by the side of the street, sit there and wait for buyers.... The shopkeepers put their stuff outside the shops on stalls, displaying a hundred and one different kinds of foreign and native articles―lamps, lanterns, kerosene oil, mirrors, scent, woollen socks, boots, shoes, quinine and patent medicines, soap, pocketknives, handkerchiefs, pencils, etc., etc., together with a lot of cheap jackery, frippery and fruppery, janglery and banglery, around which you commonly see the maidens and youthful matrons of the various tribes―their hearts entirely set on it all, and with a big-eyed ‘wish-I-could-afford-to-buy-it’ look on their faces....
If you were to see the Kachin women and girls, you might pronounce them the wildest specimens of humanity you had yet met. You might even be as afraid of them as they would be of you! The Kachin is a straightforward, blunt kind of individual, without any of the twists and turns of the Chinese. He does not always appear to be saying, ‘I wonder what that foreigner has up his sleeve, anyway.’ The Kachin girl is the most in evidence, for the men do not go to market much, and the older women not so often as the younger. You are free to chat with her anywhere and everywhere: she looks at you straight in the face with an expression of mingled indulgence, delight, and amusement, as you try to stumble out your meaning in broken Atsi. She is an impulsive, demonstrative creature: you can just watch the progress of her thoughts, for she does all her thinking on the outside of her face.
Last market day I met some Lisu from the Upper Salween on the street. They were carrying tremendously heavy loads of betel nut to sell. ‘Come up to our village and teach us,’ one of them said― ‘his village is about sixteen days’ journey away. We will give you food―rice and pork―as much as ever you want.’ Though he meant it sincerely, he was too busy to do more than just invite me. That district must be evangelized, but I want to find suitable natives to go first. A pretty little Lisu girl, petite and pleasant, asked me if I didn’t remember her. It turned out she was from Mottled Hill, from a family who were formerly Christian, and now married into a heathen village near here.
‘Do the people in your village want to study the Christian books?’ I asked her.
‘I don’t know; you had better ask them,’ she said.
‘Do you want to?’ I continued. ‘Yes, ever so much!’ she replied with as bright a smile as shyness would permit. Of course the younger people cannot do as they like: they have to obey their elders.
So much for the market: it is at its height now as I write―people haggling over petty little bits of prices and beating each other down by tenths of a farthing at a time.
But very different were the thoughts that were chiefly occupying Fraser’s mind—for it was from this comfortless Chinese inn that he wrote to his Prayer Circle with special urgency. Recent experiences had deepened his conviction as to the vital part God has assigned in the work of His Kingdom to intercessory prayer. Repeatedly he had had occasion to notice the difference between people and places that had been much prayed for and those that had not. In the former, half the work seemed to be done already, as if an unseen ally had gone ahead to prepare the way. This made him not only persevere in prayer himself; whether he felt like it or not, but impelled him to induce and encourage Christians at home to pray. He longed for a larger Prayer Circle behind his Lisu work―sent maps of all his districts, wrote personal letters to the members, answered questions, sought in every way to make the needs real to his prayer helpers. Great was his pleasure when one lady wrote that she was praying daily for the demon priest of the Sword Ladder Festival, and when another said that the Lisu were so real, through his letters, that it seemed to her as if they were living ‘just across the street’. That was what he wanted; and in his much-needed breathing spell in this noisy market town, he got to grips with his prayer supporters about it, urging arguments and pleading the momentous issues involved.
There are many things I wish to tell you about [he wrote]. I want to give you as good an idea of the people, their habits, their dress, their food, their language, their ideas, their peculiarities, as I possibly can. I want to tell you all about my plans for the self-support of the work―a subject on which I feel very strongly indeed. But I want to distinguish between temporal self-support and spiritual self-support. The former is eminently desirable and practicable, the latter is almost impossible for, perhaps, generations to come.
They―the Lisu and Kachin converts―would be easily able to support their own pastors, teachers and evangelists by well-advised cultivation of their own ample hillsides, and it is fitting that the mountains should bring forth supplies for the needs of those whose feet are beautiful upon them; but spiritually they are babes, and as dependent upon us as a child upon his mother. They are dependent on us out here for instruction, guidance, organization; but they are dependent on the home churches in England and America in a deeper sense, for spiritual life and power. I really believe that if every particle of prayer put up by the home churches on behalf of the infant churches of the mission field were removed, the latter would be swamped by an incoming flood of the powers of darkness. This seems actually to have happened in church history―churches losing all their power and life, becoming a mere empty name, or else flickering out altogether. Just as a plant may die for lack of watering, so may a genuine work of God die and rot for lack of prayer.
One might compare heathenism with a great mountain threatening to crush the infant church, or a great pool of stagnant water always threatening to quench the flames of Holy Ghost life and power in the native churches, and only kept dammed up by the power of God. God is able to do this and much more, but He will not do it, if all we out here and you at home sit in our easy chairs with our arms folded. Why prayer is so indispensable we cannot just say, but we had better recognize the fact even if we cannot explain it. Do you believe that the Church of God would be alive today but for the high-priestly intercession of the Lord Jesus Christ on the throne? I do not: I believe it would have been dead and buried long ago. Viewing the Bible as a record of God’s work on this earth, I believe that it gives a clear, ringing message to His people―from Genesis to Revelation―YOU DO YOUR PART.
Have you ever thought it strange that God allowed nearly eighteen centuries to pass before opening the gospel door to more than half of the human race―India, China, and Japan? Though the church cannot shirk responsibility for the fact, I still believe God had a purpose in it. I believe that He tried the evangelizing of the heathen―if I may reverently say so―many times in former centuries, but His church did not rise to the occasion: she was too encumbered with error and corruption, too powerless, to nourish the children to which she gave birth; and such sporadic efforts as were put forth by earnest men in past centuries to form churches in (what we now call) the mission field never resulted in anything live and permanent. At the time of the Reformation, she, the Church was only just beginning to come to her own, and it was not until after the Evangelical Revival of the eighteenth century that God, as it would seem, deemed her fit and strong enough to bear and nourish children in the midst of the great heathen systems of the world. It is rather striking, to me, that Carey’s departure for India, which we regard as the birth of the modern missionary movement, took place just two years after the death of John Wesley, the central figure of the great Evangelical Revival.
And now, the mother church of Protestant countries is well able to nourish the infant churches of the Orient, not only in regard to men and money but also in regard to a steady and powerful volume of intercessory prayer. Applying this to the work among the Tengyueh tribespeople, I feel I can say that you, and those God will yet call to join you in this work, are well able to sustain the spiritual life of the Lisu and Kachin converts, as well as to increase their number many-fold. And just as I feel that God has waited until the home church attained strength enough to nourish her children―before giving her her present large and growing family in the mission field―so, it may be, He has been preparing you for the unseen and spiritual parenthood of these infant Lisu converts here, however many thousand miles separate you from them.
You may perhaps say: ‘Do you get the converts themselves to pray as they ought to?’ This is a very natural question and I can best answer it by saying, yes―and no. I get them (or try to get them) into the habit of prayer, but it is only the cry of the babe they utter, not the strong pleading of the adult. They only know how to pray with anything approaching intensity when they or their friends are sick and their prayers in such cases seem to be remarkably effectual, but they know nothing of pleading for the salvation of souls. Unfortunately it is not many, as yet, who see that it matters much whether others are saved or unsaved. Their prayers are almost entirely selfish, just as a baby’s cries are. One does not think hardly of a baby for that reason! Moreover I can go farther and say that large numbers of converts do not realize what salvation means, even for themselves. More will do so later on, given time, instruction, and something in the nature of a revival; but at present their knowledge is very elementary and their attainment small. They have not yet grown to military age in this spiritual warfare; they are babes in God’s nursery, not warriors in God’s army. But you have centuries of Christianity behind you, you have had a Christian education, Christian influence, an open Bible, devotional helps, and many other things to help you in your growth to spiritual maturity. So now you belong to those of full stature in Christ who are able to ‘help... with power against the enemy’. The vast difference between you and them is that you are ‘grown up’ in Christ, while they are babes and sucklings; and the work of pulling down Satan’s strongholds requires strong men, not infants.
They―the Lisu and Kachin converts―have their difficulties, of course, and sometimes persecutions, but in speaking of their present inability to fight in this spiritual warfare, I mean warfare in a purely spiritual sense. I will not labor the point: you will see from what I am saying that I am not asking you just to give ‘help’ in prayer as a sort of sideline, but I am trying to roll the main responsibility of this prayer warfare on you. I want you to take the BURDEN of these people upon your shoulders. I want you to wrestle with God for them. I do not want so much to be a regimental commander in this matter as an intelligence officer: I shall feel more and more that a big responsibility rests upon me to keep you well informed. The Lord Jesus looks down from heaven and sees these poor, degraded, neglected tribespeople. ‘The travail of His soul’ was for them too. He has waited long. Will you not do your part to bring in the day when He shall ‘be satisfied’?
Anything must be done rather than let this prayer service be dropped or even allowed to stagnate. We often speak of intercessory work as being of vital importance. I want to prove that I believe this in actual fact by giving my first and best energies to it, as God may lead. I feel like a businessman who perceives that a certain line of goods pays better than any other in his store, and who purposes making it his chief investment; who, in tact, sees an inexhaustible supply and an almost unlimited demand for a profitable article, and intends to go in for it more than anything else. The DEMAND is the lost state of these tens of thousands of Lisu and Kachin―their ignorance, their superstition, their sinfulness; their bodies, their minds, their souls; the SUPPLY is the grace of God to meet this need―to be brought down to them by the persevering prayers of a considerable company of God’s people. All I want to do is, as a kind of middleman, to bring the supply and the demand together.