Directory_and_Chronicle_1850 — Page 60

1850.

Letter from B. J. Bettelheim.

37

This was a stroke blasting all our prospects at once. It was the third dispatch we had received from government, and the first from the tsung-li kwoán

the first dignitary in the country, high- er than whom we now understood we could not go. For though our latter urgent and repeated petitions had all been addressed to the king himself, we had even after so long a delay, received no rescript, and we were thus obliged to look upon the short, measured, weighed, and sharply cutting note of the premier as the ultimatum of all our appli- cations. The Lewchewans wanted neither physician nor apothecary, charity doctor nor master of languages, neither would they know aught of geography or astronomy. What was I then to do? The "Because thou sayest, answer was plain, to be their missionary.

I am increased with goods, and have need of nothing; and knoweth not that thou art wretched, and miserable, and blind, and naked, I counsel thee to buy of me the word of God, which is quick and power- ful, and sharper than any two edged sword, and a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.” I purposed to be their missionary and nothing more; the only occupation they did not officially deny me, and the only one indeed for which I had good reasons not to ask permission, knowing, too, I had permission, commission, and express order, from the highest Power to go to every nation and disciple them in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

I had some weeks before this begun the public exercises of my mis- sionary office with memorized sermons in the composition of which— strange to say-my todzies, one way or other had a good share. Some prayers from Morrison's Chinese translation of the English liturgy had by this time been rendered into the Lewchewan, and daily read over at family worship-and we will praise God for it,-being audibly followed by our servants, all native Lewchewans. This was encourage- ment enough to go on in our blessed work, and to know nothing among them save Jesus Christ and him crucified, every other way to a rational employment having been cut off.

Through divine grace I was thus permitted to have in this country about a year's active missionary exertion. True, the opposition in- creased with each month-nay, each single day-still the whole of that

that charity was given to the sick on the part of government or the native doctors, as a retort to my suggestion that the poor needed relief, and shows their who hypocrisy. Recently, I took a box of ointment to a poor leprons woman, was much in need of it, and who burst into tears as she saw it, exclaiming, "Oh, Sir ! this will take much money." The native doctors know how to charge for their medicines, and there is not a charitable institution in the country of any deseription

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