"As a rule, both the Greek and the Armenian clergy are uneducated. Most of them are very little higher intellectually than the Turkish mullahs. Some of them can merely read the service, and no more. There is no inducement for educated men to go into the priesthood because the pay is so small; altogether too small to enable them to live decently and to give their families the ordinary comforts of life. Educated men cannot afford to become priests, and as education is not required in either the Greek or Armenian Churches, when a priest dies the congregation select one of their own number who happens to be able to read and make him their priest. A bishop of the Armenian Church in this vicinity recently resigned to accept a government office, and gave as his reason for doing so that his salary was not sufficient to support his family and to educate his children.
"Agricultural and industrial education is needed more than anything else in order to enable the people to get the best profit from their labour and to teach them^to use modern labour-saving implements and methods.
"It is the policy of the missionaries to make the natives do everything for themselves so far as practicable, and native pastors relieve them of much of their labour except supervision. But at the same time the missionary must drive new stakes and plough new ground and plant new seeds all the time to extend his sphere of influence. And he travels about for this reason, holding religious services in the native languages and drawing believers together until he gets enough material to start a church. I know a man who preaches three times every Sunday in three different languages in different places to different congregations — Turkish, Armenian and Greek. And they have all kinds of schools to look after, from kindergartens to theological seminaries. The latter are especially important because they furnish pastors for the native churches. The faculties in the American colleges are nearly all natives, but the presidents, the deans, and the treasurers are always Americans, and the boards of trustees are mixed.
If you would attend a gathering of native pastors in Turkey you would find that they compare favourably in appearance and manners and intelligence and education with the members of any conference or presbytery or ministerial association in the United States, and that is one of the reasons why their work has been so successful. The Moslem priests and the clergy of the orthodox Greek and Armenian churches are almost universally uncouth and illiterate men and the public in Turkey is prompt and keen in detecting the difference.
President Angell, of the University of Michigan, who was United States minister to Turkey for several years, once said: "So far as Americans are concerned the missionary work in European Turkey and Asia Minor is and long has been almost exclusively in the hands of the American Board. In no part of the world has that board or any board had abler or more devoted representatives to preach the gospel, to conduct schools and colleges or to establish and administer hospitals. Wherever an American mission is established, there is a centre of alert, enterprising American life, whose influence in a hundred ways is felt even by the lethargic Oriental life.''
The vital need, however, is chapels. Every congregation ought to have a home and its own place of worship. It is not necessary to explain the advantages. They are obvious. It is just ten times as important for a native congregation in Turkey to have its own house of worship as it is for a congregation in the United States, and for the same reason. And, as a rule, the congregation in the United States has ten times the financial ability to provide its own house of worship as the little circle of native believers in Turkey.
Each of the one hundred and fifty-nine American missionaries in Turkey to-day has a district like the diocese of an Episcopal bishop, with a dozen or twenty churches under his care. He visits them regularly, advises with their pastors, superintends their schools, and exercises a paternal authority over the people. They consult him concerning their temporal as well as their spiritual welfare, not only the members of his congregation, but men of every class. No class of people in all Turkey are so trusted by the officials and the public and by every race as the American missionaries. All classes accept the word of a missionary without question. Money is intrusted to him for safekeeping or for transmission to other hands without asking for a receipt, and it is a common thing for officials of high rank to seek counsel of missionaries when they are in doubt or in danger. As a well-known writer has said: