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Show AND THE WORK. I AM not competent to write a theological essay, but even to the layman it is obvious enough that Jesus healed, taught, and loved. The mission station in Tehchow sees its task to heal, or if that is not possible, to treat in a hospital, to teach the children in a school for boys and girls, and to show the population of China that love only can lead this country to a better future. And accordingly this task, the enrichment of the whole life of the people, is divided into three sections, medical, educational, and evangelistic. Compared with the others we medical workers have probably the easiest job even though maybe it is the heaviest. It is the easiest because it is likely that we have less need to fight against old tradition than other groups have. If anybody starts any work in China, he must know that his work will be divided into two parts: first to make away with things wrongly done before, and then when he has reached the "zero point" to begin to build up his ideas on a new foundation. The mentioned "zero point" of course is never reached, and the fight against the old tradition is an endless and continuous one. Medical practice has a thousand-year-old tradition, but medical science meant something entirely new for China, and foreigners built it up from the very beginning; nothing traditional could be taken into consideration. Schools were being carried on long before missionaries came to China, and modern educational workers in their effort to bring their schools up to date face the power of tradition. Most of the teaching, of course, has to be done by Chinese, and they are naturally influenced by the system of teaching by which they were taught as well as by the attitude of society. Thus it happens that many characteristics of China's age-old system of education still survive in even the best of modern schools. Evangelistic workers have even more difficulty in reaching the "zero point". Superstition is still widespread in Europe and, I suppose, in America too. Imagine what an amount of superstition and false beliefs there must be in China, a country where more than 90% of the population cannot read or write and where mystics are at home. Twenty-six years ago the eighty-bed hospital was built with modern equipment. |
