Our Magazines by A. J. S. B.

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Aug 26, 1909

Our Magazines

By A. J. S. B.

For years the spirit of prophecy has been calling upon our ministers and workers to enter the large cities and proclaim the message. In one way and another our faithful ministers have undertaken large efforts in the great cities, with varying success. All these years our house-to-house workers have labored hard to reach these city homes (protected by servants, watch-dogs, janitors, and speaking-tubes) with our subscription and trade books. The Lord has greatly blessed the efforts of these workers, one of whom had, at last accounts, visited nearly every home in San Francisco.

As recently stated by one of our ministers, however, the phenomenal sale of our ten-cent magazines in the cities, month by month and quarter by quarter, indicates the first permanent, sustained response to the urgent call to give the truth to the teeming millions in the congested centers of America.

Our magazine agents are successful in reaching the families and the business and professional people of the cities. Business managers, bookkeepers, heads of departments, clerks, bankers, tellers, office boys, elevator men, and others readily buy the neatly dressed magazines from our businesslike agents. Note, for instance, the record recently made by a timid sister in one of the largest cities of the West. Being overtaken by the rain, she entered the largest department store in the city, spoke kindly to the manager, and secured permission to pass rapidly from clerk to clerk throughout the building. In a short time she had sold one hundred magazines, at ten cents each. As she was about to leave the building, she found that it was still raining. Taking another one hundred copies of the magazine, she stationed herself at the outer entrance of the store, and in a little while had sold these also to the clerks and others as they passed by. She thus sold two hundred ten-cent magazines in one department store, and on a rainy day at that.

Incidentally, her profits for those few hours’ work were fourteen dollars. The financial aspect of her work, however, troubles her very little, her chief desire being to see the salvation of souls. In this respect she is typical of a very large class of our devoted periodical workers.

The self-supporting feature of this city missionary work is also worthy of note. Instead of our conferences being obliged to draw upon the tithes to support these magazine agents, the amount of tithes is materially increased by the faithful, large tithe these workers are able to pay. And these are not mere theoretical increases “upon paper;” for the president of an Eastern conference recently took occasion to publish in his conference paper the exact amount of tithe received from only one of the magazine scholarship companies of his conference—nearly one hundred dollars.

When every conference shall have completed the organization of its tract and missionary department by appointing a missionary secretary, whose business it shall be to thoroughly organize the magazine work of the conference, to train the agents in church institutes, assign territory, and arouse a live interest

in the possibilities wrapped up in this work,—when this shall happen, we repeat, a new era will dawn for our work in the great cities, and for our home missionary work generally.

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Let us encourage all classes of our people not now at work, to enter the field, assuring them, from past experience, that the Lord is a good paymaster. Let us urge our workers to send their orders for all publications through the conference tract society, thus binding the local workers close to the missionary department of the conference and helping to strengthen it. In short, let us, by proper organization and a strong, hearty support, give our magazine workers—the “miners and sappers” of our great gospel army—every chance for success in their earnest, consecrated endeavors.

A. J. S. B.