William L. Stidger

“ This friendship for the United States is a thrilling thing found all over the Far East. One finds it in Korea, as well as in the Philippines, like a burning light of glory. Korea says, "America is our only hope! We have always trusted and loved America!"
One finds it like a silver stream running through the life of China. Dr. Sun Yat Sen said to me in Shanghai: "America has always been China's staunch friend! America we trust! America we love! America is our hope! America is our model!" ”

“ We want America to know that our faith in the Independence of Korea has not died! The fire burns higher to-day than ever. The Japanese cruelties are worse! The need is greater! The oppression is more terrible! Our determination is deeper than ever before! I have come here this day, knowing that you are going back to America; I came to write these words in my own blood that you may know; and that America may know; that our faith is a flame [56] which burns out like the beacon lights on the Korean hills, never to die! ”

“ Night has fallen. We have seen the great Temple by crimson sunset and now we shall see it by night.
The shadows seem to wrap its two thousand exquisite carvings, and its Bells of Buddha in loving and warm tropical embrace. But no warmer, is the embrace of the shadows about the Temple than the naked embrace of a score of Javanese boys who hold to their hearts naked [47] Javanese beauties who sit along the terraces looking into the skies of night utterly oblivious to the passing of time or of the presence of curious American strangers. ”

“ One night the sky was flame from sea to zenith across Manila Bay. It was like a great Flame of the Forest tree in full bloom. Against this sky of flaming sunset-clouds, hundreds of ships, anchored in the bay, lit their lesser crimson lights; while, now and then, a battleship which was signaling to another ship, flashed its message [21] of light against the fading glow of glory in the crimson sunset.
"It is light talking unto light; flash unto flash; crimson unto crimson!" ”

“ There is another Physical Flash-light that will never die.
Coming out of the Singapore Straits one evening at sunset, bound for the island of Borneo across the South China Sea, I was sitting on the upper deck of a small Dutch ship. The canvas flapped in the winds. A cool, tropical breeze fanned our faces. Back of us in our direct wake a splashing, tumbling, tumultuous tropical sunset flared across the sky. It was crimson glory. In the direct path of the crimson sun a lighthouse flashed its blinking eyes like a musical director with his baton beating time. ”

“ But to-night men and women alike walk the decks of this Manila-bound ship. They are all in white. One stands at the bow of the ship, glad to catch the salt spray on tanned cheeks, glad to feel the sea-touched winds playing with his hair, glad to see fair women of the Orient tanned with summer suns; for it is summer in the Philippines, while winter reigns in China and the rest of the Oriental lands further north. ”

“ Taishan, the oldest worshiping place on earth, not far from the birthplace of Confucius; in Shantung; is one of the most sacred shrines of the Orient. There, countless millions, for hundreds of centuries, have climbed over six thousand granite steps, up its mile high slope to pay their vows; to catch a view of the blue sea from its imminence; to feel the sweep, wonder and glory of its sublime height, knowing that Confucius himself gloried in this climb. ”

“ The name "America," which stands in the Oriental mind for the United States, is a sacred passport and password. It is a magical word. It opens doors that are locked to all the rest of the world; it tears down barriers, century-old, that have been barricading certain places for ages past. That simple word opens hearts that would open with none other.
The eyes of the brown men of the Far East open wide at that word, and a new light appears in them. This is particularly true in Korea, in China, in the Malacca Straits, and in the Philippines. ”

“ When one comes back from such a trip, having fortified himself with the reading of many books written about these far lands, in addition to his [xi] travel, one still has the profound conviction that, after all is said, done, and thought out, the only honest way to picture these vast stretches of land and humanity is to confess that all is in motion; like a great mass of bees in a hive, one on top of the other, busy at buzzing, buying, selling, living, dying, climbing, achieving; groping in the dark; moving upward by an unerring instinct toward the light. ”

“ The Japanese Government never had anything that quite worried it so much. It is a weapon that is worth a thousand battleships, or fifty divisions of soldiers. It is a weapon that will, if continuously, and consistently and faithfully used, bring a money-loving nation, like Japan to her knees, and send her finally, scurrying like a whipped cur, with her tail between her legs back home where she belongs. ”

“ One will roam the world over and see nothing more beautiful than this great tree which looks like a massive umbrella of solid flame.
Every flower in the Orient seems to be a crimson flower. The tropical heat of the Philippines, Java, Borneo, Sumatra, the Malay States and [20] India's far reaches; with beautiful Ceylon, and Burma; seems to give birth to crimson child-flowers.
The sunsets burst into bloom, as well as the flowers. There is no region on earth where sunsets flare into birth and die in a flash-light of glory and beauty like they do in the regions of the South China Sea. ”

“ It is fear that makes them worship idols. It is fear that makes them kill their girl babies. It is fear that makes them build their little narrow winding streets, which after a while must become so filthy; fear that if they do not, the devils will find them; and if they do build their streets narrow and winding the devils will get lost searching for them. Oh, God, fear, fear, everywhere! The Orient is full of a terrible and a constant fear! ”

“ I sensed it in the conversation [53] of young Koreans who had graduated from American schools. It was there; a vibrant, living, pulsing, faith in God and in the justice of their hopes: the Independence of Korea.
The whole thing was summed up for me in a flash. It was a flash of the light of a tremendous faith that blinded mine eyes for a day; but my soul it lighted as with a great eternal light.
A Korean boy stepped into the home of a missionary friend of mine, whose name I dare not use. If I did he would likely be sent home by the Japanese. Men have been sent home for less. ”

“ But perhaps the highest and holiest Flash-lights of Friendship that one finds in the Far East is that of the friendship formed by the American missionaries for the people among whom they are working, and the friendship that these people give in return. These are holy things.
The average missionary comes home on his furlough, but before he is home three months he is homesick to go back to his people. So they [208] come and go across the seas of the world through the years, weaving like a great Shuttle of Service the fabric of friendship for themselves and for the United States. ”

“ Fire in the sky, fire on the sea, fire on the ships, fire in the flowers, fire in the trees of the forest; fire in the Poinsetta bushes which flash their red flames from every yard and jungle.
In the tropical lands flowers do not burst into blossom; they burst into flame. Great bushes of flaming Poinsetta, as large as American lilac bushes, burst into flame over night in Manila. ”

“ In the chapter on "Flash-lights of Faith" I told the story of the seventy-five-year-old Korean who unflinchingly faced the Japanese gendarmes and admitted that he knew the source from which the Independence Movement had come; and knew the signers of the Declaration personally; every one of them. This spirit burns in the heart of, not only the babies of Korea but also in the souls of the white haired stately patriarchs.
One old man who was dumb had his own way of expressing his patriotism when "Mansei" was yelled. He always lifted his arms above his head. ”

“ Nothing but that trail of black smoke as we stood on the top of Boroboedoer at dawn and watched.
Then something happened. It was, as if some magician had waved a magic wand back of the mountain. The rising sun was the magician. We saw its heralds spreading out, like great golden fan-ribs with the cone of the volcano, its direct center of convergence. Then before our astonished, our utterly bewildered, and our fascinated eyes, that old volcanic cone was changed to a cone of gold. Then the golden cone commenced to belch forth golden smoke. ”

“ It is a flame; this business of love; a flame which, flashing by day and night, lights the world to a new glory.
* * * * * *
One night the missionaries in Korea saw flames bursting out against the hills.
"What is it?" they cried, filled with fear.
"The Japanese are burning the Korean villages!" said one who knew.
All night long the villages burned and all night long the people were murdered. Runners brought news to the hillsides of Seoul where anxious, broken-hearted American missionaries waited. ”

“ I could not hear it because even so great a sound as that furnace must have been [43] making will not travel sixty miles, even though it was as still up there in the old theological tower as a country cemetery by winter down in Rhode Island when the snow covers the graves.
Then suddenly a flare of fire shot up directly behind the cone of Fuji, flaming into the coal-bank of clouds above the mountain, as if the old shaggy seer had forgotten his age and was dreaming of youth again when the earth was young and he was a volcano. ”

“ I said by way of a question.
"It prevails everywhere in the Orient. To me it is the most awful thing about working out here. The awful sense of constant fear that is on the people always and everywhere."
Pounded-up claws of a tiger; the red horn of a deer; pulverized fish bones; roots of trees, pigs' eyes; and a thousand poisons and fear-remedies make up the medical history of the Oriental doctor.
"Why do they kill girl babies?"
"Fear!"
"Fear of what?"
"Fear of devils! The devils will be displeased if a girl baby is born. Therefore kill the baby. ”

“ From Japanese Obies, which clasp the waists of Japanese girls, to Javanese Sarongs, the flame and flash of crimson predominates in the gowns of both men and women. Where an American man would blush to be caught in any sort of a gown with crimson predominating save a necktie, the Japanese gentlemen, the Filipino, the Malay, and the Javanese all wear high colors most of the time. And the women are like splendid flaming bushes of fire all the time. ”

“ But suddenly the thought came to one of the passengers; that to the poor Chinaman the fear which made him do that foolish thing and the fear which made him take that awful risk was very real.
"Under God, the poor Devils must have an awful life if they have such a fear as that in their souls day and night!" said an Englishman.
"They never start out for a day's work that they are not haunted every minute of that day by a thousand devils, ill-omens, and bad spirits which are constantly hovering about to leap on them and kill them!" said a missionary. ”

“ A great oil tanker full of Cocoanut-oil had burst into flame, trapping thirty men in its awful furnace. Its gaunt masts stood out like toppling tree skeletons from a forest fire against the now deepening might; made vivid and livid by the bursting flames that leapt higher and higher [22] with each successive explosion from a tank of gasoline or oil.
I got out my Graflex and caught several pictures of this flash-light of flame, but none that will be as vivid, as lurid, or as lasting as the flash-light that was etched into the film of my memory. ”

“ I have been told so many times that the cruelties in Korea have been stopped. Certain men said that they had been stopped immediately after the Independence Movement, but they were not stopped. At frequent intervals the American press is flooded with statements which come from Japanese press sources that the outrages in Korea have ceased.
I said to this missionary, who had just arrived from Korea, "Is it true that the cruelties have stopped in Korea?"
"No! They have not stopped! They have not even diminished! They are getting worse, rather than better!" ”

“ Never in the history of the world have Christian people been subjected to the same tortures, the same cruelties, the same terrors, for their Faith as the early Christian martyrs; save these; the Koreans.
We had thought that the world had gotten past that day when men would be tortured, crushed, persecuted, and killed because they were [51] Christians but that day is not yet past as almost any American Missionary in Korea will testify.
The Japanese officials will say that there is no persecution because of Christianity; but missionaries in Korea know better. ”

“ It is because you have sent so many good men and women to China to help us; to teach us; to live with us; to love us; to serve us! It is because your missionaries from America have shown the real heart of the United States to us!" said Mr. Walter Busch, a Chinese American student who is now editor of the Peking Leader. ”