Mission Notes

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D. C. · Jan 26, 1905

A NEW help to the evangelizing of Central Africa is a line of English government steamers on the Nile, running once a month from Khartum to Gondokoro, the frontier town of Uganda. The schedule allows fifteen days for the round trip.

AT the opening of the new Free Methodist College at Wen-chow, China, about thirty government officials were present in state, and one hundred students from a Chinese school came twenty miles to see the opening ceremony. This is one more evidence that the missionary's opportunity in China is now!

ALL the awakening in China to the attractions of Western virtue is but the opening of doors for the entrance of the one truth that will produce lasting and fruitful reform in that country. Upon the Christian church lies responsibility for entering the open doors quickly, lest some scoffer get in before the messenger of Jesus Christ.

THE British and Foreign Bible Society has received from Rev. Mr. Casalis, of the Paris Mission in Basutoland, South Africa, $826 as an offering for its Century Fund, from the Basuto churches. About forty dollars of this amount is from a newly organized church under charge of a young native pastor, which has very few men on its list of members. Most of the money came from the sixty women of the church. These black women earned it a few cents at a time, and made it truly a thank offering.

THE work of German missionary societies is less generally known in America than it should be. A table of statistics to January, 1904, prepared by the Moravians at Herrnhut, shows that thirteen principal German societies (including the Moravians and the Basel Society) have 573 stations and out-stations, 924 European and 5,077 native workers, 425,489 converts, 21,542 baptized in 1903, and 61,280 catechumens under instruction for baptism. The receipts of these societies in 1903 amounted to 6,452,962 marks, or $1,535,805.20. Nine of the societies suffer from a deficit on the expenses of the year.

THREE years ago a Mohammedan merchant from Timbuctoo went for trade to the English settlement of Bathurst on Gambia River. Some one gave him a text card in Arabic. The next year he traded again in Bathurst, and asked for the book from which that wonderful text was taken. When the Bible was shown him, he bought it, and went away. The third year the merchant came to Bathurst, and bought eighteen Bibles for friends who wanted the book. Now the British and Foreign Bible Society is arranging to open a Bible depot in Timbuctoo, the synonym in all the Sahara for Mohammedan exclusiveness and fanaticism.