The General Conference assembled on the green, the big tent where the meetings were held in the upper right-hand corner.
The delegates from foreign countries who attended the General Conference of Seventh-Day Adventists, Washington, D. C., May 13 to June 6, 1909.
The glad striking things of this conference, as we wrote of the one four years ago, is that it is a missionary conference. But far more than four years ago. The last conference was a missionary conference. This is a more missionary, a greater missionary conference.
Four years ago not a few local conference men came to secure help for their local field; but now one of the most important meetings on the ground is an early morning meeting in which conference presidents and leading men are coming together with leading workers from the great needy fields of earth to learn how they can help these fields in furnishing men and means from the home field.
Inspiring indeed are the reports from the great mission fields. But a few years ago the delegates and representatives from foreign lands were not many, and the most of these were Americans. Now they come one hundred strong from various fields, nearly every one a foreigner, to America, many not able to speak English at all, and the interpretation of thrillingly interesting reports have been before the conference again and again.
How good it sounded to hear that the everlasting good tidings were going to the world, published in sixty-one different languages, and to-morrow, so to speak, this statement will be out of date.
Our representatives had a glad story to bring from Russia, dark, tradition-bound, tyrannizing Russia. The old bonds are broken. The exiles are less frequent. Greater liberty of the Gospel has entered. Brother Perk told through an interpreter of his experience with Brother Conradi in a Russian prison, dark, dank, and filthy, with its horrible black bread. Now for the last four years 1,541 members had been received by baptism and 613 by vote, making the membership now 3,077. That these are faithful is shown in the tithe they pay for the support of the Gospel ministry. In 1905 it amounted to $5,587. Last year it had amounted to $11,431. In four years it had more than doubled. There are now 14 ministers in the field, and 67 other languages. Most of the gains were in the latter part of the period, for the first part was in a time of persecution. Literature now circulates quite freely with little trouble from the censor.
Thus the work has gone in Russia. Often baptisms have taken place at midnight. Men and women have been exiled to Siberia and the Caucasus. But wherever they have been driven, Christ and His truth have gone, so that from St. Petersburg in the west past the Ural Mountains, over into Siberia, far on even to Manchuria has gone God's everlasting Gospel. From the icy north to the Black Sea and to the Caucasus, even into Tartary, have little churches been raised up, and lights kindled of God are shining in the darkness. United in one are Great Russians, Little Russians, White Russians, Polanders, Lithuanians, Germans, Armenians, Jews, Kalmucks, Cossacks, etc., united in one in the Gospel of Christ. Out from Russia's multitude of nations God is gathering a people who are keeping the commandments of God and the faith of Jesus, and opening doors are meeting the heralds of truth everywhere.
