Words From Schools in Foreign Lands
The China Mission has at present only one worker that can properly be counted as a teacher,—Miss Ida Thompson, who is conducting an Anglo-Chinese school in Hongkong. The school has an enrolment of about twenty. It was opened last fall, and while it presents encouraging features, yet it is an experiment, and may not continue beyond the first of the coming year. We had a very good school the past year, the increase over the year before being about fifty per cent. I have just returned from a trip in the interest of the school; and the prospects seem to be favorable for a good attendance the coming year. Our school opens in January; we are planning to have our first teachers' institute during the holidays this year. We hope to have a profitable time. Our yearly balance sheet has just been made out, and shows that we have made a gain in running of about fifteen hundred dollars during the past year. Our effort with “Christ’s Object Lessons” has paid off about half of the original indebtedness of the school, and we hope the good work will continue until the debt is entirely liquidated. We have about fifty in the school home and seventy in the day school. In addition to this number we have nearly one hundred and fifty who are attending the schools that are taught by our faithful boys in the kraals at a distance from us. We are trying to follow the instruction that has been given us so many times to train burden-bearers. Yet it is here as it is elsewhere,—there are few that one can depend upon. There are many whom we can depend on some of the time and in some places, but to find one whom we can depend on at all times and in all places and under the most trying circumstances is difficult. We need men who are masters of any situation. They will be placed many times far from outside help. They will have to erect their own buildings. They will have to grow their own feed. They will have to be the leader and instructor in every enterprise. They will have to stand alone when everything seems against them. They must know this truth will triumph, and be determined to triumph with it in spite of all appearances. They must be able to endure, seeing him who is invisible. Yet when we see the change that God has wrought in the few years that we have been here, we are found saying many times that these people are farther advanced than we are; that is, in comparison to the light they have had. We open a school as the first step in raising up a church; we send out a teacher first, and the preacher follows him. Or I might more properly say that the teacher is the preacher, and the preacher is the teacher. A preacher who is not an educator is of no use to us here; and a teacher who can not teach the science of salvation, and who does not make it his first, last, and only work to prepare pupils for the kingdom, is of no use to us.