Mission Notes

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D.C. · Jun 2, 1904

BETTER than the conscience that drives, is the love that draws to the work of missions.— A. T. Pierson.

THE total issues of the British and Foreign Bible Society since its foundation in 1804 have amounted to 180,982,740 copies.

THE natives of Aneityum, one of the islands of the New Hebrides, have erected a tablet in their church in grateful remembrance of their missionary, John Geddie. On this tablet is written in their language the following: “When he landed in 1848, there were no Christians here; and when he left in 1872, there were no heathen.”

Dr. JASON'S description of the kind of missionaries needed is applicable to-day. Calling for help, he said: “Send us men who are humble, quiet, persevering, of sound talents and decent accomplishments; men of amiable, yielding temper, willing to be servants of all; men who enjoy much closet religion, who live near to God, and are willing to suffer all things for Christ’s sake.”

THE Protestant foreign missionary statistics of the world, annually compiled by Dr. D. L. Leonard, associate editor of the Missionary Review, give for the beginning of 1903, 4,697 ordained missionaries, 4,337 ordained native ministers, and a total of 84,740 salaried agents of all kinds; 1,315,000 communicants, 4,056,503 native adherents, and more than 972 pupils in the schools.— Selected.

North Africa for April gives cautious information of a special work of the Spirit in Tangier, Morocco. There is risk in giving details of individual conversions, but within a month or two about fifty persons, between twenty and thirty of whom were Moslems, have made the decision to follow Christ. The importance of this information lies in the present state of Morocco—hopeless as a valley full of dry bones, and where the law still punishes conversion by the death penalty.

THE great weakness of the church of to-day is the large percentage of members who hear the word and profess to believe it, and who even wax hot over the heretic who dares to dissent from a single line of it, but who are not working at their religion. An underpinning of words is as unstable as one of sand. The man who hopes to get to heaven by spending a little of his breath, will find that the cheap route lacks terminal facilities. He must spend his cash and his strength.— Christian Endeavor World.