Mission Notes

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jun 20, 1907

The following quotation from the Missionary Review shows the distribution of the Mohammedan peoples: “Of the estimated 200,000,000 Mohammedans, 5,000,000 are in Europe, 60,000,000 in Africa, and 135,000,000 in Asia. Of these 18,000,000 are under Turkish rule, 26,000,000 under other Moslem rulers, 32,000,000 under heathen rulers, and 124,000,000 under Christian rule or protection. Over 60,000,000 speak Indian languages — Urdu, Bengali, Pushtu, Gujerati, etc.; 45,000,000 Arabic, 28,000,000 Hausa and African languages, 20,000,000 Chinese, 15,000,000 Malayan, 13,000,000 Slavonic, 9,000,000 Persian, and 8,000,000 Turkish. Nearly every important city in the Moslem world of over one hundred thousand population is a center of missionary effort by printing-press, hospital, school, or college.”

Those whom fidelity to truth calls into lonely places and subjects to the ridicule and contempt of their generation, may take comfort from the fact that contempt does not always kill. To-day the advocates of foreign missions can look back with mingled amusement and pity at the attitude of those who opposed the sending of the gospel to the heathen a hundred years ago. One man, a stockholder of the East India Company, said in public at that time:—

“The sending of missionaries into our Eastern possessions is the maddest, most expensive, most unwarrantable project that was ever proposed by a lunatic enthusiast. Such a plan is pernicious, impolitic, unprofitable, unsalutary, dangerous, unfruitful, fanatic. It is opposed to all reason and sound policy; it endangers the peace and the security of our possessions.”

Things as bad as this, and with as little sound reason, are being said to-day about unpopular truths. But while such talk injures the one who indulges in it, and may stir up the passions of the thoughtless, it can not hinder or delay the triumph of truth.—Selected.