Mission Notes

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Aug 11, 1903

The latest station of the British and Foreign Bible Society is in Johannesburg, South Africa.

There are now in Uganda, Africa, 1,070 church buildings, with a church membership of 100,000. The first baptism occurred in that land only twenty years ago.

The complete returns for China show that Scripture issues from the Shanghai Depot during 1902 reached the wonderful total of 1,084,000 books, while orders were received for 100,000 copies more than the depot could supply.

In Africa, four hundred and thirty-eight languages and one hundred and fifty-three dialects are found; into only about seventy of these has any portion of the Bible been translated. Five hundred of them have not even been reduced to writing. The Sudan, with its sixty million people, is still without a single Protestant missionary who can speak the language, though three societies are now endeavoring to begin work there.

Tidings come of severe distress in the north of Japan because of the failure of crops and severe cold and stormy weather. The poor peasantry in the famine districts are reduced to living on sprouts, which means slow starvation if help is not afforded. A considerable famine relief fund has been raised in Yokohama, which is rendering temporary relief. Christians and non-Christians in Japan are interesting themselves in the needy, and thus far no appeal has been sent outside their own country.

For some years it has been the policy of the American Board of the Congregational Church to make an effort to develop native help in the mission fields, instead of largely increasing their force of American missionaries. They have been very successful, but the time has come when re-enforcements must soon be sent out to take the places of those who have been long in the field. Statistics show that exactly one hundred of their missionaries have been in the work for thirty years or more; three have passed the fifty-year limit, while twenty-six have served over forty years.

Among the evidences that the day of the Lord is at hand, and that every nation, kindred, tongue, and people is to hear the gospel before that day, is the publication and circulation, apparently under sanction of the papal authorities, of a translation of the Gospels and of the Acts. The translation is in the language perfectly familiar to the Italian people. Although there are many notes which bear the church’s interpretation, still the people have the Scriptures, and they speak for themselves. The first edition is of one hundred thousand copies, and sells in paper covers for four cents, and in cloth for six cents.

Be systematic, proportionate givers. Let us portion our objects,—the home and foreign fields, current expenses, and neighborhood relief; and portion our gifts, our time, and money, and prayers. The variety of our means is as infinite as the variety of the ends to which we give, and the demand is constant. Under which of these heads does the debt come? — Exchange.

The immediate evangelization of the world, men say, would involve superficial work; let us be slow and thorough. Slow and thorough is one thing; slow and stagnant is another. Superficial work! Who proposed that the world should be superficially evangelized? We have betrayed our Lord under the pretense of doing thoroughly his work in this land, where we have sown the seed over and over again in ground already sown, while two thirds of the human race have been allowed to live and die in ignorance of the fact that there is a Saviour, or any love of God. And in our folly we have forfeited the richest spiritual blessing at home by deliberately transgressing the plainest divine law, “There is that scattereth, and yet increaseth; and there is that withholdeth more than is meet, but it tendeth to poverty.”—Robert E. Speer.

“Conflicting reports appear from various sections in China, and from some of these reports it would seem as if the empire was on the eve of another revolution similar to that of 1900. From other quarters the tidings are peaceful and hopeful, indicating the subsidence of the storm which swept with such fury over the land. It must be remembered that China has an immense territory, and that communication between its several sections is difficult and slow, so that an uprising in one district may have little influence, and even be practically unknown, in an adjoining province. The recent outbreak in the province of Szechuen was for a while of serious proportions. Yet that wave of rebellion hardly made a ripple among the people of the northern and eastern provinces. Let us keep in mind the vast area and population of China. This western province of Szechuen has a population almost as great as that of the United States, and an uprising in one of its cities would affect Peking or Shanghai or Foochow far less than a riot in San Francisco would affect New York or New England. Yet the time may come when the vast mass of more than four hundred million, more or less ignorant and selfish, might be so wrought upon that a great upheaval would be inevitable. But as yet there are no signs of any such disturbance.” The province of Szechuen, with a population of almost sixty-eight million, is one of the sixteen provinces that have never been entered by the third angel’s message. Surely entrance into this vast empire should not be delayed longer.

The Bible has been translated into the Thibetan language by a Moravian missionary.