PROTESTANT SUCCESS IN THE PHILIPPINES.
GOD is preparing hearts in all lands for the reception of the Gospel message, and thousands are eager to emerge from their age-long darkness to the full light. The following extracts will show something of the opening doors and hearts in the Philippines:— The Baptist Missionary Union has a petition from 7,000 Filipinos in one particular district of Panay, who have petitioned the union’s agents in the Philippines to come and labor among them. They live in seven villages clustered around the town of Janiway, which would be the center of operations should the union answer the petition in the affirmative. Unfortunately, Mr. E. Lund, who went from Spain to carry on the work among the Filipinos for the union, has been compelled to retire from the islands, owing to ill health. Both he, writing in the Missionary Magazine, and Rev. Chas. W. Briggs, writing in the Examiner, are most sanguine concerning the avidity and rapidity with which the Filipinos will embrace a purer form of Christianity than they have known hitherto. The following from the Missionary Review of the World corroborates the above, and shows the readiness of that field for missionary effort:— No mission of the church has received a more emphatic expression of Divine approval than that established [in the Philippines] on the first anniversary of the great victory in Manila Bay. The other churches have entered the field, there is room for all, and one Evangelical church has been established, the various missions having divided the archipelago among themselves, in the interests of harmonious co-operation. This gives to our church all of southern Luzon and one-half of the Visayan group. Our three stations at Manila, Iloilo, and Dumaguete are insufficiently manned, but the results are beyond what could be expected with such forces. Already we have enrolled three hundred and fifty-two communicants, two hundred and ninety-nine of them during the year, while hundreds more are requesting instruction and baptism. Our medical work there, as in all our fields, presents a magnificent evangelistic opportunity. The Philippines are in our hands for weal or woe; the character of American influence upon them will depend largely on the American Church. With our civilization goes much of evil. The church should see to it that there goes more of good. An intelligent people, having found their light but darkness, are looking to us [Protestant missionaries] for the true light of life. The Baptists have sent to the Philippines a man who for twenty years had been a missionary in Spain, and with him a native Filipino who had been converted in Spain. They went to Jaro, where no other missionaries were laboring. The eagerness of the people to hear these two men in the Spanish and Visayan languages led them so to overcrowd the meeting house that another and larger one had to be built. There exists among some of the Philippine Islanders a legend like that which obtained among the Karens of Burma, “that the Supreme Being would some day send them religious teachers,” and it is said to be owing to this tradition that some of the missionaries are having such success among the Filipinos.