Mission Notes

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D. C. · Nov 19, 1903

During the last one hundred and twenty-seven years India has suffered from seventeen famines.

“China is far to the front in the thought of God and the missionary opportunity of to-day. From every side come indications of open doors and a marked change in the spirit of the people toward the missionaries. It is God's harvest time for China's millions.”

A most inspiring picture of progress in the Dark Continent is to be seen in a recent issue of the Christian Express (Lovedale), under the heading “African Gleanings.” These are a few of the nearly score of topics touched upon: “Italian Immigration to the Kongo,” “A Railroad from the White Nile to the Abyssinian Frontier,” “Rapid Progress with the Cape-to-Cairo Railway,” “Survey of the Southern Shore of Victoria Nyanza,” “Advance Southward of the French Trans-Sahara Railway,” etc.—Selected.

The members of a native Y. W. C. A. in Tung-cho, China, supported a Bible woman in Ceylon for sixteen years prior to the Boxer outbreak. Then the church and everything of value were destroyed, and the members were scattered in every direction, and were houseless and penniless. Recently these women sent their contribution as formerly, to their denominational board rooms in America, with an apology for being so late in sending it, as it was not easy to reach the scattered ones still alive, and expressing the hope “to do more in the years to come than in the past.”

The condition of the girls in Central Africa is touchingly described by Gertrude Ward, a missionary of the Universities' Mission, as follows: “Shall we teach them reading?—They have no literature or books of any kind. Writing?—They have no occasion to use it. Arithmetic?—They have no accounts to keep, and are not as a rule required to count higher than twenty. Sewing?—Their clothes are the loose draperies thrown gracefully around them, and they do not require a single stitch. Laundry work is unknown and unneeded, each person washing her own draperies in the river, and drying them in the sun; housework scarcely exists, the people's houses being little mud huts, to shelter them from wild beasts; they contain no furniture and few utensils, and the people live almost entirely in the open air.”

According to the Bible Society Record, the work of Bible distribution is still hampered in many countries professedly Christian. A special permit from the imperial government is necessary in Austria, and this is not always to be obtained. In Greece the government has forbidden the circulation of the Greek edition which is printed by the Bible Society; and in the French colonies of Tunis and Cochin China, Bible colporteurs are not allowed to work at all. Turkey has rendered it impossible to circulate the Bible in Albania, and Persia has closed her gates to all importation of the Scriptures in Persian. The public exercise of any other than the Roman Catholic religion is absolutely forbidden in Peru, and until quite recently the same rule has prevailed in Ecuador. Brazil is the only South American country in which the circulation of the Bible is looked upon with favor by the government.—Selected.