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TURKEY : THE BLIGHT OF ASIA

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AMERICAN INSTITUTIONS UNDER TURKISH RULE

Page 5

    What America needs, and what Europe needs, is a great spiritual awakening. Christ is all right. He is unutterably wonderful and lovely. Let us all unite under His banner, and then think about advancing into foreign lands.

    The ruin wrought to our missionary institutions in Turkey, which has inspired so much caution with regard to the fate of the remainder, is epitomized in the following table issued in 1923 by the American Board of Foreign Missions:

Missionary Churches: 90% closed.

American Colleges: Work suspended in six out of eight.

Hospitals: One-half operating.

College Heads: Two dead, one deported, three refused permission to return.

Village Schools: (Estimated at 1000). Abandoned.

High Schools: Only three out of forty-one now open.

Property loss: Estimated at $2,880,000.

Native workers: Two-thirds dead; others in exile.

Constituency: 95% dead or deported or enslaved in harems.

American Workers: Fifty deported.

    This chapter can have no more appropriate ending than the following quotation from the pen of the Reverend Ralph Harlow, formerly Missionary to Turkey, and now Professor of Biblical Literature and Comparative Religion at Smith College, Massachusetts:

    "One hundred years or more ago, our fathers sent forth to Asia Minor the first American missionary. For all these years our churches have carried on the glorious task of awakening and renewing among the peoples of that land, loyalty to the person and principles of Jesus Christ. Schools and colleges, hospitals and churches have been built. A host of men and women have come to love, generation by generation, the people of that land. It was the laud that gave our faith birth; it was its cradle; it planted the seed from which the church sprang in the blood of the martyrs."

    "To-day the Turkish Government announces that in the future there will be no Christians in that land, and that no Protestant missionary work will be permitted."

    "For five hundred years, the Christians of Asia Minor have been the objects of persecution, while Christian civilization has stood by and looked on. In more recent years the barbarity of that persecution has shocked the conscience of humanity. In the eighties came the Bulgarian horrors; in the nineties came the Armenian atrocities; in 1909 Adana ran red with the blood of slaughtered thousands and echoed to the wail of countless women."

    "In each case the Turk was restored to power; in each case lengthy promises of good conduct to his Christian subjects were extracted."

    "From 1915 to 1918 came that series of atrocities such as the world of our day had hardly the emotions and conscience to comprehend, even amid the horror of the other cruelties of those other years. Those of us who were in the land at that time, who saw these things with our own eyes, have never told half of the truth of those dark hours. The Allied nations swore by all that was sacred, by the crosses of their fallen dead, that these things should not again be possible. One million five hundred thousand is a conservative estimate of the lives struck down in lust and torture. America sent in workers and dollars to the relief of the starving and tattered fragments of the people who survived the blast."

    "The man most responsible for all this horror was Talaat Bey. What is the attitude of the government of Mustapha Khemal to Talaat and his methods? When Talaat died the government at Angora held a service in his honor. The Yeni gun, the official organ of the Nationalist party, came out with great mourning bands of black. In the editorial were these sentences: ‘Talaat wrote the most glorious pages in Turkish history. Let the eyes that do not weep become blind. Let the heart that does not ache cease to beat.’ Khemal has followed in the footsteps of Talaat. Massacres, deportations, cruelty, outrage and terror, have marked the reign of the Nationalist government. The Smyrna tragedy has taken place in hundreds of villages on a smaller scale. The innocence of childhood, the sacredness of womanhood, the tears of mothers, the cries of the helpless, make no appeal at all to the armies or the courts of this government."

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