THE SPHERE AND MODES OF WOMAN’S WORK IN FOREIGN LANDS.

In this age, when Christian women in many lands are engaging in the Foreign Mission work with so much zeal, it is important to know who should enter personally upon this work, and what are the modes and departments of labor in which they can engage when on the ground.

No woman should go to the Foreign field who has not sound health, thorough education, and a reasonable prospect of being able to learn a foreign language.  The languages of different nations differ as to comparative ease of acquisition, but it is well for any one who has the Arabic language to learn, to begin as early in life as practicable.  It should be borne in mind that the work in foreign lands is a self-denying work, and I know of no persons who are called to undergo greater self-denial than unmarried women engaged in religious work abroad.  They are doing a noble work, a necessary work, and a work of lasting usefulness.  Deprived in many instances of the social enjoyments and protection of a home, they make a home in their schools, and throw themselves into a peculiar sympathy with their pupils, and the families with which they are brought into contact.  Where several are associated together, as they always should be, the institution in which they live becomes a model of the Christian order, sympathy and mutual help, which is characteristic of the home in Christian lands.  Christian women, married and unmarried, can reach a class in every Arabic community from which men are sedulously excluded.  They should enter upon the foreign work as a life-work, devote themselves first of all to the mastery of the language of the people, open their eyes to all that is pleasant and attractive among the natives, and close them to all that is unlovable and repulsive, resolved to love the people, and what pertains to them, for Christ’s sake who died for them, and to identify themselves with the people in every practicable way.  Persons who are incapable of loving or admiring anything that is not American or English had better remain in America or England; and on the other hand, there is no surer passport to the affections of any people, than the disposition to overlook their faults, and to treat them as our brethren and sisters for whom a common Saviour died.  Let no missionary of either sex who goes to a foreign land, think that there is nothing to be learned from Syrians or Hindoos, Chinese or Japanese.  The good is not all confined to any land or people.

Among the departments of woman’s work in foreign lands are the following:—­

I. Teaching in established institutions, Female Seminaries, Orphan Houses and High Schools.

II.  Acting as Nurses in Hospitals, as is done by the Prussian Protestant Deaconesses of Kaiserswerth, who are scattered over the East and doing a work of peculiar value.

III.  Visiting from house to house, for the express purpose of holding religious conversation with the people in their own language.  This can only be done in Syria by one versed in the Arabic, and able to speak without an interpreter.