Religion: More Than Conquerors

See Cover: What kind of man makes a good missionary? Once, a preacher who needed an assistant decided to take a chance on a middle-aged man who was bossy, opinionated and temperamental, with a strong streak of fanaticism and an unsavory past. He turned out to have picked the greatest missionary of all time.

Saul the Pharisee, now Paul the Apostle, joined Barnabas to preach and proselytize in Antioch for a small sect of Jews who called themselves Nazarenes. When he died some 15 years later, he left behind him the firm foundations of a world religion. He shaped Christianity with his thought; Augustine and the church fathers built upon his theology, and Martin Luther found in Paul's writings the key to the Reformation: justification by faith. He stamped Christianity deeply with his missionary zeal; no other religion has penetrated into the corners of the world so persistently, and so careless of the odds, always within the echo of Paul's exclamation: "Woe is unto me, if I preach not the Gospel."

From St. Francis Xavier, awaiting his lonely death on an island off the China coast in 1552, to Bishop James Walsh, suffering in a Chinese Communist jail in 1960; from young Samuel Miller, dying of fever on a ship homeward bound from Africa in 1818, to Missionary-Pilot Nathanael Saint, sinking under the spears of the Amazon's Auca Indians in 1956, brave men have looked to the great missionary to the Gentiles, himself no stranger to suffering. Paul knew the inside of jails around the Mediterranean. Before he died, almost certainly as a martyr, he was scourged five times within an inch of his life, he was beaten thrice with rods, four times he was shipwrecked (once adrift in a storm for 24 hours), once he was stoned and left for dead. He spent his ministry, he wrote, "in weariness and painfulness, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness," finding himself "in perils from waters, in perils of robbers, in perils by mine own countrymen, in perils by the heathen, in perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils among false brethren."

A New Day. The perils were no fewer for the countless missionaries who fol lowed Paul. Again and again the successive missionary waves were forced back —by the collapse of Rome, by the Moslem invasions of Europe, by the 18th century revolutions. Yet again and again new missionaries picked up the Cross and took it farther than it had been carried before—in the Crusades, with the expansion of the Latin empires in America, finally in the great 19th century advance of Protestant missions, when eager young ministers streamed out of U.S. seminaries, hungry to save the heathen "from Greenland's icy mountains, from India's coral strand." They accomplished mighty works, particularly in hygiene and education; many of today's new African leaders were educated at mission schools.