Recognition

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D. C. · Apr 7, 1904

RECOGNITION of the Roman Catholic Church as Christian from a foreign missionary standpoint is a new thing in Protestant circles. But it appears that the New England Southern Methodist Conference reached this point in a recent session at New Bedford, Mass., according to a report made in the New York Sun. The report of the general missionary cause committee, which was made to the conference, March 26, was unanimously referred back to the committee for revision, after a sharp attack upon it by Rev. W. F. Butler, because of its classification of Catholicism with paganism. The report said:—

The marvelous success of our missions in most all lands has led to the erroneous conclusion that the work of world evangelization was nigh accomplished, whereas it is actually only beginning.

While the paganism of Asia numbers about half the population of the globe, while the heart of Africa has hardly been stirred to a consciousness of the blessings that abound in Christ for her degraded multitudes, while our possessions in the Orient and the vast expanse of South America are under the thrall of a type of Christianity almost as bad as paganism, surely we must conclude that those places that summer in the light of the gospel are only oases in the desert, green or beautiful, but all around a gloomy waste expanding to the skies.

Are Protestants prepared to eliminate papal lands from their field of missionary operations?