Herbert Stanley Jenkins , Medical Missionary to Shensi, China

Herbert Stanley Jenkins [1874-1913] served with the Baptist Missionary Society in China. This biography also includes some material on the wider work of the BMS there.

My thanks to Redcliffe College for providing a copy of this public domain title for digitisation.

Richard Glover [1837-1919], Herbert Stanley Jenkins, M.D., F.R.C.S., Medical Missionary, Shensi, China with Some Notices of the Work of the Baptist Missionary Society in that Country. London: The Carey Press, 1914. Hbk. pp.155.

Contents

• Author’s Note

1. Earlier years
2. The Work of the Baptist Missionary Society in China
3. Shensi Work
4. Entrance on Missionary Work
5. The Medical Missionary
6. The Revolution
7. The Last Stage
8. Some General Reflections
9. Letters From Friends

Chapter 1: Earlier Years

The proper study of mankind is man – a study full of instruction for those who pursue it with real earnestness. The strange way in which purposes are formed, expanded, and achieved by inspirations of grace, and the honour which God puts on all faithfulness, demand attention. There is especial interest in noting how Providence, operating simultaneously on individual lives and also on nations, secures augmented results from each.

The outward features of Stanley Jenkins’ earlier life are soon told. He was born in Bristol in 1874; one of the younger members of a large family, most of them marked by physical energy, and constituting a typically happy and united home; a home where the Herbert Stanley Jenkins parents blended happily authority, love, and piety, and where the number of the children supplied the genial corrective of all selfish tendencies; a home, therefore, where all natural excellences might be expected to thrive, where good health and good temper prevented any early and weakening development of self-consciousness, where it was natural that all kindly qualities should develop.

In the history of his school-days nothing very remarkable is to be noticed, save that while still a youth (in his fourteenth year) the great awakening of the soul came to him.

Parental piety was the atmosphere in which his higher thoughts and purposes were matured. He was greatly helped by some of those activities which devote themselves to the spiritual quickening of the schoolboy. Some may criticize defects in these activities, saying they develop unduly self-consciousness, are too doctrinal in their presentation of the Gospel, and give a trend to the devout life tending to make it narrow, and lead to the idea that character is complete when conversion to God has taken place. Possibly there are grounds in some instances for such views. In the case of Stanley Jenkins no such influence can be traced. The great fact of his life was that Jesus Christ then aawned on his soul. In the language of St. Paul, “The light of the knowledge of the glory of God shone through the fac~ of Jesus Christ into his heart,” flooding it with a sunshine that never failed, but grew until it became the light of heaven….

Pages 11-13