Mission Notes

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D. C. · Jan 5, 1905

FIFTY years ago the Bible was an unknown book in Japan. There are doubtless millions of Japanese who know comparatively little about it to-day, as there are millions in all parts of what we call Christendom. Yet the Bible has now made considerable impress upon the populace of Japan as a whole.

CHILE and Argentina have jointly set up a colossal statue in bronze of “Christ the Redeemer,” at the highest point of Upsallata Pass in the Andes. Both countries sent representatives of rank to the imposing ceremony of the unveiling, which took place in the middle of March. This great monument on the frontier is a memorial of the settlement of a long boundary dispute. In place of the usual frontier guards, armed to the teeth and glaring defiance into one another’s faces, the boundary will henceforth be marked by this benignant figure, which recalls to all passers their common allegiance to the Prince of Peace.

THE British and Foreign Bible Society has recently received $193.60 for its Centenary fund, from Malay Christians in the island of Sangir. The gift calls attention to the wide pervasiveness of modern missionary effort. The island of Sangir most of us will have to hunt up on the atlas. It lies about midway between the northern point of Celebes, in the Dutch East Indies, and the southern point of Mindanao, in the Philippines. Missionaries from the Netherlands have been working there for years.

THE head of the first ancestor of the human race is supposed by the Chinese to be buried near a temple at Chen-chau, in the province of Honan. During a festival there this summer the people thronged the China Inland Mission premises. The local preacher, the native Christians, a native evangelist from Taiho, and the ladies of the mission talked themselves hoarse, explaining the gospel of Jesus Christ to changing and eager audiences. Even the mission doorkeeper did duty as a preacher to men who hung around in the streets outside of the door. The doors of the mission had to be locked from seven to eight in the morning, to secure time for the workers to pray and study the Bible in preparation for each day’s work. During the festival, about twenty thousand men and women listened to Christian instruction, and bought copies of the Gospel to take home with them.

IN the thick of the terrible battle of Nanshan, just north of Port Arthur, two Japanese soldiers were wounded at the same moment. One of them, a corporal, crept to his comrade, and tried to bind up his wound. The man said to him, “Don’t trouble about me, look out for your own wound; I have believed in Jesus Christ.” Then the corporal recited to the desperately wounded man, “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me.” “Yes,” responded the other, “I have been laid hold of by Jesus Christ.” At that moment a second bullet struck the speaker, and he died. The corporal lived to reach the hospital, and to tell the Christian nurse of this strange communion of souls on the battle-field. Some of the money given by Christians in the West, in self-denial and with prayer, carried the gospel to those two pagan Japanese, and so yielded forth a hundredfold on the bloody slopes of Nanshan.

THE National Bible Society of Scotland made its way into Spain as far back as 1895. The story, as told by a secretary of the society, is a remarkable one: “While yet the Bible was confiscated at every frontier, Manuel Matamoros showed us how the book might be printed in Spain itself for the use of the faithful souls, who, meeting in secret and under feigned names, were feeling their way toward the light. In a back room in a back street in the cathedral city of Malaga, on a rickety old hand-press, with scanty supply of type, a godly printer, with his own hands and such help as his wife and son could render, printed, at the cost of the society, three thousand large-type New Testaments, in the course of seventeen months’ labor during every hour of which he stood in danger of arrest and the galleys—a feat which will live in history with the achievements of those who counted not liberty or life dear to them for the sake of Christ and his gospel.”