Mission Notes

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D. C. · Nov 10, 1904

THE Scriptures issued by the British and Foreign Bible Society last year numbered 5,697,361 copies. The total for the previous year was 5,943,775 copies. These are by far the two highest annual totals ever attained by the society.

SOME remains of the Mohawk Indians still exist in Canada, and they have asked the British Foreign Bible Society to issue a new edition of the old Mohawk translation of the Scriptures, since, to many of them, the Bible is a closed book in any other tongue.

A MISSIONARY, moved by the spectacle of Russian wounded cared for by Japanese trained nurses who wear the red cross, and do all that they can for their stricken enemies, writes: “The war has been a marvelous revelation of Japan’s capacities and character. The nation loves high ideals, and keeps its gaze steadily upon them.” There is surely to be an opportunity for preaching Christ in Japan before long, the like of which has not been seen in any other non-Christian land.

A MAN in Tsin-uin, Che-kiang, China, recently reached his fiftieth birthday. The occasion calls for idolatrous festivities. But the man was a Christian, and after some study of his duty in the emergency, he contributed to church building the money which the pagan festivity would have cost. That man’s conversion has reached every fiber of his being.

NATIVE Christians of the Cannibal Islands—for the Solomon Islands in Melanesia surely deserve that name—are active in foreign mission work. Fourteen men from Florida Island are missionaries in Guadalcanar, Mala, and Raga. The people of Savo Island have now asked for teachers, and four more volunteers from Florida are to go to that field.

HERE is a hint of the influence of the mission leper asylums in India. The Bible woman at the Nasik (Bombay) Asylum was taken sick, and could not conduct evening prayers. The Hindu women in the asylum, though not professing to be Christians, conducted the services themselves,—singing the hymns, repeating the Scripture texts one after another, then the ten commandments, and finally the apostles’ creed, after which the leprous Hindu women called on a Christian girl to offer prayer. The girl prayed for help, gave thanks for help given, and thus the strange service ended. So out of the mouths of these babes in knowledge does God ordain praise!

THE following table showing the number of widows in Bengal from one year old and upward, was recently published in the Prabsi of Allahabad:—

AGE	No. of Widows
0—1	433
1—2	576
2—3	651
3—4	1,756
4—5	3,681
5—10	34,705
10—15	75,900
15—20	142,871

The fact that babies in their first year are already widows implies that a far larger number of marriages at that age have taken place, and it might be possible to estimate the number of wives under one, two, three, four years and upward by multiplying the number of widows by thirty or forty. This applies only to Bengal, and would need to be further multiplied, according to local conditions, to find the total, for all India, of child-widows and child-wives, any of whom may become lifelong widows long before they know what marriage means.—Selected.