Directory_and_Chronicle_1850 — Page 62

1830.

Letter from B. J. Bettelheim.

39

To throw a spark of light into this thick darkness, is worth sacrific- ing comfort, health, wealth,-even life itself.

A year, as I said, all went on well, far beyond my humble, and some- times even sanguine expectations. But, alas, it is now nearly two years since that year of bright hopes ended. I often linger on the cheerful recollections of the past, like a cheering dream, which though turned into nothing on awaking, yet one can not banish from the mind, and I fain hope to see it realized at some future day. I shall never forget a scene which drew out my deepest emotions; even now when I think of it, it calls forth my liveliest gratitude to the Giver of every joy, present and past. I stood on the bridge before the Min-tun dan

proclaiming the love of God as revealed in the gospel of his dear Sou, to two crowded shores, and felt as happy and triumphant as if, on Xer- xes' bridge across the Bosphorus, I had seen Europe and Asia hang on my lips. Speaker and hearers were absorbed in the momentous sub- jects considered. Amid the gloomy aspect of my present unattended and unheeded labors, when traversing the localities formerly enliveu- ed by cheerful multitudes, I ask myself with painful astonishment, Are these the places where the gospel aforetimes made such sensation, raised such hopes, and at least found ears to hear it, if it did not hearts? Why now no marks of life, no sign of interest? Is it all quite gone ? Who has done this, who has so utterly wasted God's vineyard? There is no other answer: the enemy has done it, Confucianism has done it, Budhism has done it, Japanese treachery and tyranny have done it—all alike horned heads of this many-headed beast, Antichrist. Here we have not only to combat the natural aversion of the human heart to anything requiring faith, not only to soften the insolubility of invete- rate prejudice, and meet the active opposition of false creeds and their champions; we have also to resist the underhand, vexatious, unrelenting encroachments of an idle government, glad to find employment for its spies, and try to outmanœuvre its subtle, unseen machinations, cha- racterized as they are by reckless falsehood towards us, and cruel op- pression of the natives.

In this land, where the authorities are all in all, and the people no- thing, it is matter of wonder and gratitude, that we have been able to prosecute missionary labor with the degree of liberty we had, even for one year; to nothing, humanly speaking, but the support we had in the almost regular arrival of men of war, and the deep, moral effect wrought on the whole nation, its rulers not excepted, by the protracted exercise of liberty, which the French would not suffer to be denied them by Japanese chicanery, can the shortlived freedom wc enjoyed be account-

!