00.01 Forward

FOREWORD.

AT the Ohio State Christian Endeavor Convention held in Zanesville in 1912, it was the privilege of the writer to conduct the conferences on the work of the missionary committee. At one of these, after stating the causes that had led a number of great missionaries to the field, the young people were asked to tell what had given them their own interest in missions. Many life-stories were told and a deep impression was made.

That evening, in personal conversation with the writer, a prominent minister who had been present at the conference in the afternoon, confessed that he had expected to be a missionary but that his fiancée (at that time his wife) was unwilling to go and he had given it up for her sake. Next morning another prominent minister made the same statement.

What did it mean? Here were two pastors, both highly successful in their work, lost to the foreign field because being a missionary would have interfered with their human affections. Were there others who had rejected the call for like reasons? Alas, that their name should be legion!

Investigation has proved, what every mission board secretary knows to his sorrow, that many a young volunteer, pledged to foreign missions, turns aside from his life-work because of some love affair. The call of Love, clashing with the call of God, proves the stronger. Yet, perchance. Love’s call was of God as much as the call to the field, and through faith, patience, and prayer, might have been brought into harmony with it.

It was in the hope of helping young people to solve aright the problem of marriage and missions that these love stories of great missionaries were searched out and written. Last year they found publication in the columns of The Sunday School Times. Now, through the courtesy and kindness of the editors of The Times, they form the chapters of this little book. God grant they may be blest as they go forth on their mission again.

It must not be imagined that these love stories are the only ones in the history of missions worth telling. There are others just as heroic. These were selected because each represents a different type and impresses a much needed lesson.

Belle M. Brain.

Schenectady, N. Y.