Abel, Charles

Adventurous blood ran in Charles Abel’s veins, and his early life was one of wandering and varied experiences in Australasia.  He lived among the New Zealand Maoris, labored in timber forests, and worked as a stevedore on the Sydney docks.  His contact with New Zealand Maoris turned his mind to mission work.  After a night of prayer, he made his decision, began studying by himself, and finally returned to England for more systematic training.

What a people, those to whom he dedicated himself—cannibals who gloated on human flesh as the only meat one could gorge without after-effects, cruel in their torturings, constant in their tribal warfare, grotesque in their vast, frizzled mops of hair and painted skins.  Chalmers, who first guided Abel in his pioneering, perished at their hands.  “They did not know what love is,” wrote Abel.  “No animal is more careless with its young than the average Papuan mother.”  Cruel themselves, they believed themselves ringed about with cruel spirits.  “The attitude of the people, when I first moved among them, was one of wretched foreboding of imminent evil.  Those who think that heathen are happy and should not be intruded on by Christian missions, little know their true situation.”

Papuans are in abject fear of witch doctors.  One such, who averred that he had messages from spirits in a high tree, incited his following against Abel and his word.  An immense tidal wave was impending, so he said, which would sweep the intruders from the earth and bring to the Papuans shiploads of tobacco, calico, and other desirable things.  At times, this hostility took perilous turns and brought the unwanted teacher to the verge of destruction.

Like Paul, Abel found himself in peril of his country-men, English gold prospectors with little conscience in their treatment of Papuan natives, and especially of native women.  “When I saw Taubada (Abel) face revolvers pointed by his own angry countrymen, that he might plead for some Papuans, I knew he was truly our friend,” testified one native eye-witness.  And they returned his goodness in kind when he had once won their hearts.  One day, a capsized whale-boat was hammered by breaking surf.  All that saved Abel’s life was the stout refusal of his boys to leave him, though to stay meant utmost hazard to themselves.

In the early days, it seemed as if the grip of sin would never break.  Abel and his wife spent nights in prayer.  They also realized that their converts needed the fortification of an ordered life, that idleness endangered them in every way, that a wholly new framework of living called for establishing.  So alongside of their schools they raised workshops and a steam sawmill, built the mission launch with Papuan hands, established copra plantations, and fought malaria.  Evangelists, earning their own support after the Pauline model and evangelizing at the same time, supplemented the old system where teachers, in spite of their sincerity, settled down to idle inefficiency.  “Why are your ways different?” would be asked of Christian boys from Kwato, felling hardwood in heathen areas.  The explanation quickly followed.  The test of the fruit is the eating.  It was a common thing for Papuan students, when preaching, to point to Paulo, once outlawed even from cannibal communities, as the best proof of the truths they were stating.

Everything needs cleansing in these sin-smitten people.  With the clean, blue sea washing their shores, with cool, pure mountain streams running near every village, there is no excuse for the unspeakable filth in which they live.  They like dirt.  And alas!  The Papuan is no cleaner in his mind than he is in his body.”

Such is “the state of nature,” M. Jean Jacques Rousseau!  Such is the natural heart, Dr. Channing, you with boyish, self-confident face and tight-bound stock, on Boston Common.

“As I have done my work, face to face with my begrimed, skin-diseased, reeking congregation,” wrote Mr. Abel, “my heart has sickened and the temptation has come to take boat and make for the next village.  I was one day reproved by the thought that Christ must often have worked among very dirty people in the slums of Jerusalem.”

Abel faced other audiences who also needed regeneration, little as they suspected it, and nowhere did the Christian manliness of the man show itself more attractively.  On his occasional visits to English-speaking countries, he was sometimes asked to speak before anthropological groups, scientific bodies, Yale students, the Century Club, and the like.  The outlook and attitude of his hearers was, as far as the Gospel is concerned, usually indifferent or hostile.

When asked to address the Chicago Sunday Evening Club, it was intimated to him that an evangelical message would be quite an unusual thing.  He turned the suggestion down.  “It must be His message, and no trimmings,” he said to himself.  The microphone reared its head, snake-like, in front of him.  The announcement of the chairman that their speaker was a man of international renown filled Abel with disgust, but he succeeded in making clear to his packed audience that what Christ had done for Papuans, He could do for every hungry heart present that evening.

Charles Abel was cut off in the vigor of his years by a road accident in England but his work goes on.  Thousands have entered Christ’s fold.  These converts immediately get busy in what they call “the work of getting right,” hunting up unpaid debts, seeking forgiveness and granting forgiveness, putting away witchcraft with all its complications.  Many of those dominated by spirits were awful-looking, haggard-faced folk.  Their whole appearance is now changed.  One converted sorceress at Wagawage formerly terrorized the community.  She used to dig up graves and eat corpses, a usual witch-practice, and confesses to have murdered eleven people in her lifetime.  Now she goes about preaching Jesus.

People to whom the concept, love, was once unknown, today demonstrate it.  At Wagawage is a mission school to which children come from far distances for training in a Christian atmosphere.  One Christian woman, and there are others who do likewise, feeds thirteen children beside her own while they are at their schooling and declares that never has her garden been more fruitful than since she undertook this for the Lord.

The story is told of a convert named Bokamani who went into a remote region to evangelize.  He was ignorant and inexperienced.  For two weeks he lived in Guimi village waiting for the Spirit’s command, but it did not come.  So he sought to live as Jesus would live, carrying firewood for astonished old women, fetching drinking water from the spring, showing kindness to cripples and gentleness to all.  The people were amazed.

Then came the day when the Spirit of God said, “Speak,” and Bokamani recounted the story of his new birth.  Now the villagers knew what it meant.  The mystery of his kindness was made clear to them, and he was soon leading them into the Kingdom, one by one.