Mission Notes

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jun 30, 1903

EVEN in the Dark Continent the world moves. For it is a scant twenty-five years since Stanley appeared on the Lower Congo, after a year's perils to reach the coast, and now there reaches our table an account of a conference of missionaries held at Leopoldville, January 19, representing four American and three European societies — two hundred of them coming from fifty stations, and able to tell of six thousand native Christians, with hundreds of schools and all that! — Northwestern Christian Advocate.

FIFTY years ago seven shoemakers in a shop in the city of Hamburg said: “By the grace of God we will help to send the gospel to our destitute fellow men.” In twenty-five years they had established fifty self-supporting churches, had gathered 10,000 converts, had distributed 400,000 Bibles and 8,000,000 tracts, and had carried the gospel to 50,000,000 of the race. It would take only one hundred and fifty such men to carry the gospel to the world in twenty-five years. — Exchange.

IN China posters have been circulated in denunciation of foot-binding. The upper part of the poster is covered with a series of illustrations intended to depict the cruelty and results of foot-binding, while the lower portion is occupied by a statement of the Anti-Foot-Binding Society. The work of this society has received a great impetus by the action of the dowager empress in issuing a decree against this ancient practice. May it soon be a custom entirely of the past! — The Baptist Missionary Magazine.

THE railroad just completed up the Congo has cost twelve million dollars and four thousand lives. More than twenty human lives have been laid down upon every mile of that wonderful road into the heart of the Dark Continent. On that one enterprise alone more lives were sacrificed than all the lives sacrificed in foreign missions from the days of the apostles to this present time. They did it for earthly riches that fade away from us and we from them; but our sacrifices are for Christ, from whom no power in the universe can separate us. They have done this to obtain the commerce, the gold, and the diamonds of that country of inexhaustible resources. But we have a world from which the richer treasure of redeemed men and women can be gathered for the enrichment of the kingdom of God. How long shall we wait to see a sacrifice on the part of the church, comparable to the blessing to be obtained in its making? — Exchange.