Globalization of the United States, 1789-1861

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Hooker, Edward W. Memoir of Mrs. Sarah L. Huntington Smith, Late of the American Mission in Syria. New York: Published by the American Tract Society, 1846.

Edward W. Hooker. Memoir of Mrs. Sarah L. Huntington Smith, Late of the American Mission in Syria. New York: Published by the American Tract Society, 1846. Title page.

By the 1820s the American missionary movement had established stations around the world often in tandem with the British missionary movement, both struggling with language barriers.

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“We were most cordially welcomed by our friends, who seem quite happy and devoted to their work. This brings me to the moral aspect of the mission, which, though mentioned last, is not, I trust, last in my heart. I think I may say it is encouraging, much more so than either of us expected. We feel that a wide door of usefulness is opening before us, which will demand all our energies, and even more.

“The Arabs are extremely free and social in their habits. The trials of missionaries here, and perhaps in most Eastern countries, are of a different character from those which are imagined by friends at home. They are not so much personal privations as moral perplexities, arising from the ignorance and deceit of a population destitute of that civil and religious freedom, furnished only by the diffusion of God’s word. If our operations assume a more decided cast, we know not but we shall yet have the ‘persecutions’ which are promised among the blessings of ‘a hundred fold,’ to those who forsake home and country for Christ. If, as his servants, we should be thus identified with our Lord, may we have grace to endure this fellowship with his sufferings.

“The language of the country furnishes the most formidable difficulty to surmount. Mr. Smith says that Mr. Bird has become so familiar with it as to have as great a choice of expressions as in speaking our own language. He reads the Scriptures once a week to a congregation of beggars, in his yard, after which he distributes bread to them. When I saw him in the midst of about sixty, the morning after our arrival, my thoughts immediately reverted to the Saviour’s ministrations. You can hardly imagine, though you have often been informed of it, with what increased interest the Scriptures may be perused in this country, where they were written. I seem, in consequence of the unchanged habits of these people, to enter directly into the circumstances which are described in holy writ. — The best hours of every morning I devote to the Arabic, and the first hours of every evening to Italian. I have already, through necessity, attempted to stammer in both of these; and in the French likewise, with Mrs. Chasseaud, the wife of our Consul.”

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“My trials here are not such as I anticipated, or probably such as you imagined. I will endeavor to give you some idea of their nature, though you cannot perhaps fully appreciate them without experience; at least some of them. In the first place, there is a taking to pieces, if I may so speak, of all former habits and associations, and modes of action; and the constructing of new, which shall be adapted to the circumstances of a people totally diverse from those with whom we have been educated. This demolition and reconstruction, gives one an opportunity to study his own character and attainments, and to know, in some measure, how much more he has been indebted to factitious circumstances than he had imagined; and it is not a little calculated to produce humility and self-distrust.

“The difficulties and embarrassments of a new language, are by no means small. The mortification of not understanding, and of not being understood and appreciated in conversation, is a new trial; and after the desultory habits attendant upon a departure from one’s country and voyages by sea, it requires severe discipline to bring the mind to study and close application. This unavoidable irregularity operates unfavorably upon the spiritual feelings; interrupts communion with the soul and with its Author; and renders it necessary to ‘keep the heart will all diligence.’”