Calvin Wilson Mateer: Forty five Years A Missionary in Shantung, China
9781465683038
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
Calvin Wilson Mateer, of whose life and work this book is to tell, was born in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, near Shiremanstown, a few miles west of Harrisburg, on January 9, 1836. This Cumberland valley, in which he first saw the light, is one of the fairest regions in all our country. Beginning at the great, broad Susquehanna, almost in sight of his birthplace, it stretches far away, a little to the southwest, on past Chambersburg, and across the state line, and by way of Hagerstown, to its other boundary, drawn by a second and equally majestic stream, the historic Potomac. Physically considered, the splendid Shenandoah valley, still beyond in Virginia, is a further extension of the same depression. It is throughout a most attractive panorama of gently rolling slopes and vales, of fertile and highly cultivated farms, of great springs of purest water and of purling brooks, of little parks of trees spared by the woodman’s ax, of comfortable and tasteful rural homes, of prosperous towns and villages where church spires and school buildings and the conveniences of modern civilization bear witness to the high character of the people,—all of this usually set like a picture in a framework of the blue and not very rugged, or very high, wooded mountains between which, in their more or less broken ranges, the entire valley lies. True, it was winter when this infant first looked out on that world about him, but it was only waiting for spring to take off its swaddling of white, and to clothe it with many hued garments. Twenty eight years afterward, almost to the very day, he, cast ashore on the coast of China, was struggling over the roadless and snow covered and, to him, wholly unknown ground toward the place near which he was to do the work of his life, and where his body rests in the grave. When he died, in his seventy third year, the spiritual spring for which he had prayed and longed and labored had not yet fully come, but there were many indications of its not distant approach. John Mateer, the father of Calvin, was born in this beautiful Cumberland valley, on a farm which was a part of a large tract of land entered by the Mateers as first settlers, out of whose hands, however, it had almost entirely passed at the date when this biography begins. The mother of Calvin was born in the neighboring county of York. Her maiden name was Mary Nelson Diven. Both father and mother were of that Scotch Irish descent to which especially Pennsylvania and Virginia are indebted for so many of their best people; and they both had behind them a long line of sturdy, honorable and God fearing ancestors. At the time of Calvin’s birth his parents were living in a frame house which is still standing; and though, with the passing of years, it has much deteriorated, it gives evidence that it was a comfortable though modest home for the little family.
