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Will Afghanistan Be Evangelized?
Seven Million Souls Behind Fast-Barred Doors of Fanaticism Perish Without the Gospel. How Are They To Be Reached?
M a r j o r ie a i n s w o r t h * breathed deeply of the bracing air. As the train climbed the steep gradients ^toward the frontier of Afghanistan she looked out over the cardboard brown hills that were closing in around them and her excitement mounted. It was true—not a dream af ter all—but a fact, that she was soon to be in Peshawar. Suddenly, there was a break in the hills and the train crept slowly over the narrow, lofty bridge across the In dus River. Marjorie gazed far down to the swift sullen stream and was glad there was now a bridge! “What a grand sight to have seen Alexander the Great and his army cross ing that flood by ferry!” she thought. The train pulled on through a tunnel and entered a country vastly different from the one just traversed. The bare brown hills had receded, forming a *The "Marjorie'Ainsworth” of this article was graduated from\the Bible lnslitute of Los Angeles in the class of ’21 and has been an honored missionary in India for a number of years, fo r personal reasons she prefers that her actual ñamé be withheld. Oply a few missionaries working, under va ries auspices have been able to minister to the needy in - habitants of Afghanistan ; the land as a whole still wutts the penetration of the gospel.
visiting mission stations situated in stra tegic centers at the mouths of the im portant passes which lead into closed Afghanistan—the nearest approach mis sionaries can make to that land in order to do Christian work. “You will show me Your will, Lord, I know,” she breathed upward, as the train pulled into the station. She was to remember that brief prayer, later. It was as though the Lord had taken it as a challenge and had accepted it! Into her short visit in Peshawar and the surrounding terri tory there was crowded a panorama of a tremendous need and opportunity of which she had never dreamed. . . . The peaks of Tartars gleam grey- green in the early morning light to the visitor who motors the ten miles from Peshawar to- Jamrud, grim fortress be tween India and Afghanistan. There a narrow sword-cut in the hill^ gives entry to the far-famed Khyber Pass that was once the main entrance to In dia and over which caravan loads of fruit, carpets, and silks came into In dia. But now a well-kept motor road winds up to the summit and then down again on the far side of the mountains of Solomon. There is a certain thrill in finding
fringe around a wide, well-watered plain, where stands Peshawar, the rendezvous for Indian, Tatar, Afghan, Armenian, Persian, and Asiatic Jew; and trading center of the Pathans of the Frontier Province and of the tribal hills. The names were magic to her ears. Her interest in Afghanistan first had been stirred one summer at Landour, Mussoorie, in northern India. There she had listened long and thoughtfully to a British army captain and his wife tell of their experiences on the North west Frontier. She had been alternately thrilled by the excitement of adventure and repelled by the stark cruelty of the people, but beyond it all she had glimpsed the tremendous need for gos pel work. From that first summer of language study in Landour, she had returned to her station in another part of India. But the burden the Lord had given her refused to lift. All through the years the thought persisted: "The need here is great, but Afghanistan and the tribes lands are still unevangelized. Seven million souls are waiting there, without the gospel.” And now she was here, on the North west Frontier, in the spring of 1930,
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