Kidnapping a spinster and her chaperone

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THE MISS STONE AFFAIR: AMERICA'S FIRST HOSTAGE CRISIS

By Teresa Carpenter

Simon & Schuster, $24, 238 pages, illus.

REVIEWED BY LYN NOFZIGER

For 2,000 years bringing salvation to the unsaved has been hard, often thankless and sometimes dangerous work for Christian missionaries. They've been kidnapped, arrested, tortured, killed, mocked, derided for their faith and for attempting to spread it throughout the world.

The apostle Paul experienced it from both sides. As a Jewish zealot named Saul he was responsible or the deaths and imprisonment of numerous persons whose only crime was to embrace Christianity. As a missionary sent by Christ to bring the Gospel to the gentiles he was mocked, beaten, imprisoned and eventually executed.

But things had improved down through the ages, at least in that part of Europe and Asia Minor where Paul had traveled.

And so it was that the new missionary lady from Boston, Miss Ellen Maria Stone, was in no immediate danger when she arrive in Bulgaria in 1878. American Protestant missionaries during that period were common in the part of Europe known as the Balkans that lay just across the Dardanelles from Constantinople. They were there not only to convert the Muslims of the area but also the Orthodox Christians whom they looked on as only a little better than the Muslims.