Preface

In many a religious gathering to which I was invited during my stay in America to give a talk for fifteen minutes and no more, (as some great doctor, the chief speaker of the meeting, was to fill up the most of the time,) I often asked the chairman (or the chairwoman) what they would like to hear from me. The commonest answer I received was, “O just tell us how you were converted.” I was always at loss how to comply with such a demand, as I could not in any way tell in “fifteen minutes and no more” the awful change that came over my soul since I was brought in contact with Christianity. The fact is, the conversion of a heathen is always a matter of wonder, if not of curiosity, to the Christian public; and it was just natural that I too was asked to tell them some vivid accounts of how “I threw my idols into the fire, and clung unto the Gospel.” But mine was a more obdurate case than those of many other converts. Though moments of ecstacy and sudden spiritual illuminations were not wanting, my conversion was a slow gradual process. I was not converted in a day. Long after I ceased to prostrate myself before idols, yea long after I was baptized, I lacked those beliefs in the fundamental teachings of Christianity which I now consider to be esssential in calling myself a Christian. Even yet “I count not myself to have apprehended”; and as I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus, I know not whether I may yet find my present position to be still heathenish. These pages are the honest confessions of the various stages of the spiritual growth I have passed through. Will the reader receive them as the unadorned expressions of a human heart, and judge with leniency the language in which they are written, as it is not the tongue that I learned from my mother’s lips, and the ornate literature is not the trade by which I live in this world.

Jonathan X., the Author.

An Isle in the Pacific.

May 1, 1895.