p. 14 | Mission Notes

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D.C. · Sep 28, 1905

Mission Notes

AN Eurasian named Macdonald, who is an elder in the Presbyterian church at Darjeeling, North India, went with the Younghusband expedition to Lhasa as interpreter. He was able there to preach Christ to several small groups of Tibetans, and to explain Christianity to the present prime minister and regent of Tibet, who was very anxious to learn about “the white man’s religion.” He gave three Gospels in Tibetan to this august inquirer, and distributed quite a number of Gospels among both lamas and laymen in Lhasa. Mr. Macdonald spoke the first words of Jesus Christ ever heard in the Lhasa-region from an evangelical Christian.

THE Moravian Mission Board was oppressed by a large deficit at the end of the year 1903. It now rejoices that the whole amount ($50,000 or more) has been paid by special contributions. The Baptist Missionary Society (England) gives thanks for the extinction of a similar deficit of nearly $50,000, by special subscriptions, two gentlemen of Cambridge—brothers—having agreed to pay whatever was still due after the subscriptions of the churches had all come in. The British and Foreign Bible Society has received 230,000 pounds toward the special Centenary Fund of 250,000 pounds ($1,217,000) which was called for as a reserve. Such facts show that the public interest in missions is not dying out.

A COLPORTEUR of the British and Foreign Bible Society working in Morocco reports the sale of seventy-nine Bibles and Testaments in a tour through twenty-seven Mohammedan villages. For these Scriptures he received $1.50 in cash, seventy-five cents’ worth of barley (horse feed), fifty-eight eggs, two chickens, two loaves of bread, ten cents’ worth of butter, and three cents’ worth of straw. Although generally well treated, the colporteur had to walk softly, because men in that land do not mince matters about their religious belief. One man undertook to kill the colporteur on general principles, saying that no one can object to the killing of a Christian. At another place the people proposed to burn him and his Bibles together, because the Bible does not contain the name of Mohammed.