Mission Notes

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jul 27, 1916

BISHOP BASHFORD recently declared that in the eleven years of his stay in China he had never given an invitation to come to Christ that had not met with definite response.

WHEN the shipowner in whose vessel Missionary Robert Morrison sailed said sneeringly, “And so, Morrison, you really expect that you will make an impression on the idolatry of the great Chinese Empire,” Morrison replied, “No, sir; I expect God will.” When he went to Canton in 1807, he worked seven years before he won his first convert to Christianity. But if Morrison had lived in the year 1913, one hundred years from when he received that first convert, he would have had the joy of attending, in that same city of Canton, a religious service in which there were 3,500 persons gathered to hear a Christian speaker from America.

FIRST reports being received at the Australasian Union Conference office as to the offerings during their recent week of prayer (they hold their week of prayer at another time than here in the States), indicate that a large increase in offerings will be realized this year. One conference reports that $569 more than the amount it had set as its goal had been received, although several companies had not been heard from. Australia is now one of the strong bases of supply for mission funds, and it is a source of encouragement to note that the brethren and sisters in that field are so liberally supporting the mission advance this year by their annual offerings.

VOLTAIRE, the French infidel, once said, “In a hundred years from now the Bible will be an unknown book.” And how has this prediction been fulfilled? After a hundred years his house in Geneva was a branch office of the British Bible Society. In Voltaire’s time not one Bible society existed in the world; today we have seventy-three. In 1908 the American Bible Society alone distributed 2,826,841 Bibles, and all Bible societies together published 11,378,954 copies. If we add the products of all the Bible societies, we have the enormous sum of 500,000,000 Bibles published in the nineteenth century. In Voltaire’s time the Bible was published in 38 languages; now it is in 436 languages.