Page 175 - Neglected Arabia Vol 1 (2)

SUGLECTED A KAMA

Christianity really is have been removed from their minds; they envv
ua our liberty and our opportunities of development, but to all outward
seeming, their hearts are still cold and hungerless. And yet to be used
of God to awaken that great hunger that will find satisfaction only in
Him as revealed in Christ, is the earnest prayer of each missionary in
our educational work; and as we look at the past and at the present, we
wonder where and why we have failed in this most vital respect.
There is the necessary routine or every day and constantly arising
problems of administration to absorb time and energy. Do we rush
into them in our own strength forgetting that in the early days of the
Church, the men to undertake its "secular” work were to be “full of the
Holy Ghost and of wisdom" - surely not their own but lleaveu-sem. • i
and as sorely needed now as then? In endeavoring to teach our pupils
English a language doubly hard for those accustomed to Eastern
ways of thought and expression, but which once mastered, will open tu
them rich treasures of literature non-existent in Arabic, in this effort
Jo we sometimes forget the importance of teaching them the language
uf love as Christ spoke it to little children whose angels always behold
die face of His Father in heaven? Are we. like the traveller whose
vision to the cloud-crowned mountains is blinded by the foothills at
whose base he stands, looking too often at the great strength of Islam
in the shadow of which we labor and not all the time at Him who wa>
lifted up above all principality and power that His glory might one day
fill the Moslem world also. Surely no servant of His would consciously
allow the mere machinery of his task to absorb ;oo much of his time
and strength, and just as surely no church will consciously neglect t<»
pray for those whom it has sent to foreign lands; but, face to face with
the linancial shortage at home and the lack of spiritual results abroad,
it is evident that there is some hindrance, somewhere, to the ‘‘great wave
of the grace of God,” which He is always ready to bestow. God grant
that we may learn anew how' to pray, for we dare not give the non-
Christian world less than our best. It were a cruel kindness to enlarge
die horizon of our pupils and to awaken longings in their hearts, if we
leave them a prey to vague unrest and discontent, without a fellowship
with a new Teacher who shall open to them the Hook of Life. We are
asking for a new school building in Basrah, and efficiency demands it.
hut more than anything else we need your daily prayers that our girls
may be built up a spiritual house, acceptable to God through Jesu>
Christ.

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