p. 12 | Mission Notes

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · May 5, 1903

Mission Notes

Miss Helen Gladstone, daughter of England's great statesman, has given herself to settlement work in one of the crowded quarters of London.

The American Bible Society has accepted the manuscript for the Sheetswa New Testament, prepared by a missionary from East Africa. An edition in this dialect will be published at once, for the use of the Inhambane East Africa Mission.

Russia's great Trans-Siberian railway is now practically completed. In labor alone it cost over ninety million days' work. Nearly twenty miles of bridges have been constructed across rivers. Over ninety thousand immigrants have been attracted to Siberia, as this railway brings them in touch with the world.

On the borders of Tibet lives W. A. Hyde, of the Moravian Missionary Society. He has learned the Tibetan language, and has translated the whole Bible into it. Though not allowed to enter the land, he converses with travelers passing to and fro across the border. He has lived there nearly fifty years, hoping and waiting for the opportunity to preach in Tibet.

In Italy the British and Foreign Bible Society's circulation of the Scriptures last year amounted to 106,000 copies, as compared with 102,000 in 1901, and 96,000 in 1900. The increase in the circulation of the Bible in Central America is 8,353 copies; in France it is more than 80,000 in advance of 1901, while in South Africa the circulation was 26,000 above the average of the year preceding the war.

A Chinese woman convert, when staying in a Christian home in Edinburgh recently, expressed the missionary motive from her point of view in these words: “When I see what a difference the gospel of Christ has made in the homes of the people, when I hear what people say about their personal devotion to Jesus, O, I am amazed to think that you do not see it to be more your duty to send the gospel to the women of China, that they may have your Jesus, and that they may have your God.”

It is not easy to keep pace with the reports of new railways, either in construction or definitely planned for, within the Dark Continent. A railway line is now opened so that one can go from Cape Town, by way of Buluwayo and Fort Salisbury, to the port of Beira on the east coast. A train de luxe is now run for fifteen hundred miles north of Cape Town to Buluwayo. The main line of the Cape and Cairo Railroad will cross the Zambesi at Victoria Falls, three hundred miles north of Buluwayo, and that point will be reached, it is expected, the coming autumn.