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''The Call'' is a novel published in 1985 by the American writer John Hersey. The novel, which is in the form of a fictionalized biography with letters and excerpts from Treadup's journal, presents the experience of David Treadup, an American Protestant missionary in China during the first half of the twentieth century. As the novel progresses, and China undergoes Japanese invasion and communist revolution, Treadup reconsiders whether his efforts to help China were useful and questions the usefulness of the Christian mission. Hersey based Treadup on a composite of six historical China missionaries, including his own father. Other historical figures appear, sometimes under their own names. ==Plot== The novel mixes narrative, excerpts from Treadup's journal, letters written by Treadup and his wife. and excerpts from "The Search," an extended memoir which he wrote while in a Japanese internment camp during World War II. This organization allows Hersey to show what Treadup thought at the time of events and then what he thought about them up to forty years later. The first section of the novel describes Treadup’s ancestors, a long-established Anglo-Saxon family. David himself was born 1878 in western New York, then graduated from Syracuse University. The call to missionary work comes in his last year in college, when he hears a visiting minister, John R. Mott who is proselytizing for the Student Volunteer Movement For Foreign Missions, a liberal evangelistic organization. Treadup volunteers to go to China for the YMCA, but the Y will not let him go without a wife. Treadup arranges with Emily Kean to join him in China a year later, and after a further year they are married. When he arrives in Tianjin, or Tientsin as it was then spelled, Treadup joins the educational and scientific work of the YMCA. At the 1907 China Centenary Missionary Conference in Shanghai, Treadup takes part in the debate between the older evangelists who insist that their only mission is to spread the gospel and the newly arrived missionaries of the Social Gospel persuasion like himself, who are convinced that their mission is good works, that is, the uplift of society through science, education, and social change. Through the decade of the 1910s, Treadup organizes campaigns to introduce modern science to the educated men of the city in the hope that they will spread this knowledge down to the masses. He uses posters, pictures, and scientific demonstrations to arouse interest among the audience, for instance a gyroscope, with which he performs impressive feats. This work is modeled on that of Hersey's father, Roscoe. The science campaigns are successful but conversions few. Treadup then meets the dynamic Christian "Johnny Wu," modeled on "Jimmy Yen" (Y.C. James Yen), who mounted a nation-wide literacy campaign for the Chinese National Y.M.C.A. after World War I. In the face of mounting suspicion of imperialism and foreign missions, which led to an anti-Christian movement, Wu moves to the countryside and sparks the Rural Reconstruction Movement at just the time when Mao Zedong was also moving from the city to the village. Treadup is inspired to join Wu, but Wu replies that foreigners are not welcome. Treadup instead moves to Paoting (Baoding), Hebei, where the actual missionary Hugh Hubbard worked. In the 1930s, Treadup becomes troubled about the usefulness of the American version of Christianity to China's problems. As the Fundamentalist–Modernist Controversy develops at home and in China, he is criticized by his mission board at home for being a "humanist" rather than a true Christian devoted to a personal God and Jesus as his personal savior. Other missionaries at that time, such as Pearl S. Buck, underwent similar doubts and questioning. At the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War Treadup, like the actual missionary Lewis Gilbert, witnesses the Nanking Massacre, and asks why God would allow such atrocities. When war between the United States and Japan is declared in 1941, Treadup is imprisoned in the Weixian Internment Camp, as were many actual missionaries such as John Leighton Stuart. After the end of the war in 1945, as Mao's forces take over China, Treadup leaves for home disillusioned with the American mission in China. He reflects that he came to China motivated by personal need, group psychology, hypnotism by the preacher who aroused his idealism, and fear for himself. The novel ends with a note that Treadup’s oldest son, Philip, tried in vain to get his father’s ashes buried in Shanghai in 1981. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「The Call (novel)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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