Fortunately for the success of my mission, I had a most enlightening conference in New York before I left. At the suggestion of Mr. Alfred E. Marling, who was one of the trustees of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions, I had an interview at that great centre of missionary activity, 156 Fifth Avenue, with a large group of earnest and able men, who could speak with authority on the problems I should confront in the East. I learned that five of these men were to cross the Atlantic at the same time I should be crossing. These were Doctors Arthur Judson Brown, James L. Barton, Charles Roger Watson, Dr. Mackaye, and Bishop Arthur Selden Lloyd. These men were the leaders of the Foreign Mission Boards of the Presbyterian, Congregational, United Presbyterian, Methodist, and Protestant Episcopal Churches. One of them, Doctor Barton, had himself been a missionary in Turkey, and had also acted as President of the Protestant College at Harpoot. Another, Doctor Watson, had been a missionary in the Turkish Protectorate of Egypt, and his parents had been missionaries for half a century at Cairo.
I had engaged passage for Europe on the _Imperator_, but when I learned that these five men were sailing at nearly the same time on the _George Washington_ (later to become famous as President Wilson’s “peace ship”) to attend a world missionary conference at The Hague, I asked them to change their reservations and go with me. They were limited in their expense accounts and could not change, so, emulating Mohammed, I “went to the mountain” and changed to their ship. The voyage gave me an opportunity to gain from them a fuller picture of the work of the mission boards, which was very helpful to me in my new task.
The conversations I had with these men on shipboard were a revelation to me. I had hitherto had a hazy notion that missionaries were sort of over-zealous advance agents of sectarian religion, and that their principal activity was the proselyting of believers in other faiths. To my surprise and gratification, these men gave me a very different picture. In the first place, their cordial coöperation with one another was evidence of the disappearance of the old sectarian zeal. They were, to be sure, profoundly concerned in converting as many people as they could to what they sincerely believed to be the true faith. But I found that, along with this ambition, Christian missionaries in Turkey were carrying forward a magnificent work of social service, education, philanthropy, sanitation, medical healing, and moral uplift. They were, I discovered, in reality advance agents of civilization. As representatives of the denominations which supported them, they were maintaining several hundred American schools in the Levant, and several full-fledged colleges, of which three, at least, deserve to rank with the best of the smaller institutions of higher learning in the United States. They maintained, also, several important hospitals. And, as a part of their purely religious function, they were bringing a higher conception of Christianity to the millions of submerged Christians in the Turkish Empire, who, but for them, would have been left to practise their religion without the inspiration of the modern thought of the West, which has so vastly widened its spiritual significance.