Mission Notes

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D.C. · Apr 12, 1906

IT IS STATED that forty million, or one sixth of the population of India, live upon insufficient food.

THE expense to China annually for opium is one hundred million dollars. Its victims number between twenty million and forty million.

A HINDU paper published in Calcutta gives some idea of the extent of child marriage in India. The facts, according to this authority, as reprinted in the Missionary Review of the World, are as follows: There are in the one province of Bengal alone no less than 433 infant “widows” under the age of one year; 576 widows between the ages of one and two; 651 between two and three; 1,756 between three and four; 3,861 between four and five; 34,705 between five and ten; 75,590 between ten and fifteen; and 142,871 between fifteen and twenty.

“THAT image that you have in your temple was carved by some man out of a stone, before it was placed there,” said a Church of England zenana missionary to her class of Indian children, who were sitting round, having their Bible lesson. There was a pause. The children looked shocked. Then one little girl said: ‘O teacher! don’t say so. It is the god who came down from heaven, and took the form of a stone, who is there in the temple, and whom we worship.’ Many men and women in India believe as these little children did, that the images worshiped are only the outer coverings of the gods who dwell within.”

A REALLY lovable old Mohammedan of Delhi, India, is in a pitiable state. He is worrying all the time about the danger, at his age, of sudden death. He tells the Rev. C. F. Andrews that he longs for just a few years more in which to work off by prayer and fasting the bad deeds of his early life. His religion tells him to wash hands, feet, arms, and head five times a day, so as to be pure when praying to God. He washes seven times, and doubles the legal number of repetitions of his prayer; he wears out his feeble body by fastings that are not on the books; he multiplies his almsgiving, but all in vain. He has been taught to consider God not as a loving Father, but as an inexorable taskmaster, who demands the full tale of bricks. He dares not, at his age, listen to the good news of a Saviour in Jesus Christ. O, the pity of it!