p. 15 | Mission Notes

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · May 26, 1903

Mission Notes

A SEMIWEEKLY railway service between Paris and Peking, carrying the China mails and connecting the steamship lines to Shanghai, was opened May 1, 1902. From London to Shanghai the time covered will be three and one-half weeks.

IN the province of Hu-peh, China, there are sixty-nine cities, in forty-five of which there is not a single resident missionary. Including lady missionaries and wives of missionaries, there is only one missionary to every two hundred and ninety thousand souls.

LAST October an appeal was made, through the Missionary Review of the World, for missionaries to work among the Arabs. A band of Danish missionaries have responded, and the author of the appeal, Dr. Zwemer, says that this is an answer to definite prayer on the day that the article was sent to the Review.

CHINA has attempted a census, with the result that she now estimates her population as four hundred and twenty-six million. The World's Work says that a considerable area of China is so densely populated that if all the people in the United States proper lived in Texas, forty million more would have to go there before the population would be as dense as it is in the more thickly settled portions of China.

BISHOP FOWLER, of the Methodist Church, thus describes some Japanese Christians in California: “These men go about their daily life in a most prayerful manner. One man asked that he might serve half time in the family where he was employed, that he might give the other half to the study of the Bible and prayer. Having earned enough to do so, he went into the mountains to devote all his time to Bible study and prayer, and so fit himself for Christian work. That spirit has spread throughout the company of Japanese workers. They go to the incoming steamers to meet their fellow countrymen, take them to boarding-houses, and there win them to Christ. They even sent one of their companions to Honolulu, a graduate of the university, an educated Japanese.”

SOME little girls recently received into the orphanage at Aintab, to take the place of boys who had left to earn their own living, did not seem even to know how to play. They would sit all huddled together during the play time, and had to be shown what it was to play. What a poor cramped life theirs was which never suggested to them the thought of playing.

IN China a man is required to mourn three years for the death of his father, one hundred days for the death of his mother, and not at all for the death of his wife. Indeed, a Chinaman would feel disgraced if he showed any sorrow on account of the death of his wife. This tells its own story of life in a heathen country with a civilization thousands of years old.—Reformed Church Record.

A CARD received from Miss A. Helen Wilcox, dated at Bombay, India, March 6, noted her arrival in that city. She was expecting to begin work immediately, with health literature. She felt quite sure that the Lord had led even in the time of her sailing from England, as she had the privilege of meeting with some whom she believed the Lord had designed she should meet. We shall probably have reports from her later.

A MASSACHUSETTS physician who has recently been around the world making a study of hospitals and surgical methods, says of medical missions: “The missionary physicians have been the pioneers in disseminating modern medicine throughout the distant East, and in establishing outposts for scientific research. In many of the small laboratories of the missionary hospitals, original work is being done which would be creditable to larger and better-equipped institutions.”

A SOUTH AFRICAN paper reports facts to the effect that no less than one hundred and seventy-five Boer prisoners, almost all young men, while confined in St. Helena, Ceylon, India, and the Bermudas, were converted, and have since devoted themselves to life service as missionaries to the heathen. Returning home, they are received by the Dutch Reformed Church, and great preparations have already been begun to assist them to an education that they may be fitted for their work. One congregation has subscribed ten thousand dollars for land and buildings, another has undertaken to support twenty-one students at an annual cost of two thousand five hundred dollars, another to support ten, and so on.