XVIII THOSE WHO HAVE NEVER HEARD

If all Arabia is to hear the story of the Gospel, there are many zigzag journeys yet to be made. The country is much larger than most people imagine, and a great part of it is still unexplored. Fortunately the unexplored sections of the great peninsula are nearly all uninhabited as far as we know, but no one has been there to see or investigate. If you were to travel from New York to Chicago and back on a camel, the distance would be about as great as to cross Arabia once in its broadest direction. Topsy Turvy Land is three times as large as the state of Texas, the largest state in the Union. It is nearly as large as all British India, excluding Burma, and if you spread Arabia out on the map of Europe, without tucking in the corners, you could cover the whole of France, Belgium, Holland, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Austria, Servia, Roumania, and Bulgaria.

The population of this great stretch of country with its table-lands and deserts, its villages and encampments, is perhaps eight million; and just as Arabia, with its four thousand miles of coast, has only three lighthouses for ships that pass in the night, so the light of the Gospel is shining in only a very few places along the coast, and hardly at all in the interior. At Aden, and Muscat, and Bahrein, and Kuweit and Busrah, as well as along the rivers as far as Bagdad, there are lighthouses of the Gospel. Although only like little candles burning in the night, they can be seen from a long distance. Patients come for hundreds of miles to the hospitals, and when they go away, carry the gospel message for hundreds of miles back to their villages. And yet what are these few stations for so large a territory, and what can less than forty missionaries do among so many people?

When the great Missionary Conference met at Edinburgh in 1910 and the report was made on How to Carry the Gospel to all the non-Christian World, it stated that “Of the eight million inhabitants of Arabia, it is entirely safe to say that fully six million are without any missionary agency.” One can travel from Bahrein across the mainland for 1,150 miles without meeting a missionary or a mission station, all the way to Aden. On the entire Red Sea Coast, as well as the south coast between Aden and Muscat, there is no mission work. Of the six provinces of Arabia, only three are occupied by mission stations. No one has ever preached the Gospel at Mecca, where Mohammed was born, or at Medina, where he lies buried, and although some ninety thousand pilgrims from every part of the Moslem world pass through Jiddah every year on their way to Mecca, this important city is still waiting for an ambassador of Jesus Christ.

Perhaps the most neglected class in this great neglected country are the Bedouins, or nomads. Like Ishmael of old, “their hand is against every man, and every man’s hand is against them.” Hated alike by the town dwellers and the Turks, they are the roving gypsies of the Orient, and yet they are so numerous and so closely bound together by tribal ties that sometimes one can see their black tents spread out in vast encampments like a city of tabernacles in the wilderness.

It is a strange life these children of Ishmael lead, a life full of its joys and sorrows and desert hardships. Under the shadow of a black tent, or the shade of an acacia bush, or perhaps behind a camel, the Arab baby first sees the daylight. As soon as it is born, its mother gives it a sand-bath, and the father gives it a name. For the rest, it is allowed to grow up much as it pleases. Trained from birth in the hard school of fatigue and hunger and danger, the Bedouin children grow up saucy and impudent, but with cunning and a knowledge of all the ways of the desert and the life of the caravans.

The Bedouin children have no books nor toys. They play with dead locusts or dried-up camel’s bones; they make whistles out of desert grass, and love to use the sling as David did, with pebbles from the brook when he killed the giant. The girls help in the hard work of drawing water, making butter and driving the camels to and from pasture. Although they cannot read, and have no picture books, they all of them study without ceasing the great picture book of nature, and their little dark eyes, whether watching the sheep at pasture, or counting the stars in the blue abyss from their perch on the lofty camel saddle in the midnight journeyings, are never at rest.

In some parts of Arabia, Bedouin women when they travel ride on a camel saddle called a howdij, which protects them from the gaze of strangers. Sometimes they play peek-a-boo, as the camel trudges along. In many respects their life is most unhappy. Doughty and other travellers believe that over one-half of the nomad population seldom know the blessing of a full meal. When they hear from the lips of Western travellers of countries where there is bread and clothing and peace, and water in great abundance, they are surprised, and contrast the condition of other nations with their lives of misery. One of them, after listening to Doughty’s description, threw his hands up, and uttered this prayer, “Have mercy, O Allah, upon Thy creature whom Thou createdst! Pity the sighing of the poor, the hungry, the naked. Have mercy, have mercy upon them, O Allah!” Who can help saying “Amen” to the nomad’s prayer? We cannot judge them harshly when we remember that they have never had a fair chance, and that for centuries warfare and plunder have been their daily life. I remember with much interest a Sunday I spent in the black tents of Kedar, with a crowd of nomads sitting around. They were most hospitable, and brought in great wooden bowls of fresh milk, with butter floating in it, dried dates and bread baked on the coals; then, when our appetites were satisfied, they listened, oh, so eagerly, as I told them for the first time the old, old story of Jesus Christ’s birth, and death and resurrection. Some of them were so ignorant that they had never heard of a cross, and I remember taking two twigs from the ground and showing them how our Saviour was crucified for our sins, according to the Scriptures. No one has visited that tribe in Oman since my journey eight years ago. How long must they and others wait for Christian teachers? Shall the Bedouin babies have a better chance than their mothers had?

The kingdoms and governments of this world have frontiers which are guarded and must not be crossed without permission, but the kingdom of Jesus Christ has no frontier. It has never been kept within bounds. It has a message for the whole race, and the very fact that there are millions of people in the heart of Arabia who have never heard, becomes the strongest of reasons why we must carry that message to them. Difficulties and dangers should not hold us back. They did not hold back Jesus Christ when He made the long journey to our lost world. He depends on us to finish His work. As it is written: