AFRICA OPENING HER DOORS.
In a recent issue of the Gospel in All Lands Bishop J. C. Hartzell tells of the many openings now visible in the Dark Continent. The article is interesting as showing how, in this last generation, God is opening the way for the presentation of His last message in Africa, as well as in the rest of the world. We quote from the article as follows:— For fifteen hundred years the Christian Church has been waiting for the continent of Africa to open to the Gospel of Christ. Only within a comparatively few years has that prayer been answered. To-day all Africa is not only waiting but calling for teachers and preachers, schools and Christian churches. For more than a generation the negro millions of America and their friends throughout the nation have been praying that the way would be opened for educated and consecrated black men and women from America to go to Africa, and have a share in the redemption of their fatherland. To-day that prayer is answered. If I had the means, I could put one hundred excellent black men and women from our schools in the South in different sections of Africa as missionaries, and there would be abundant opportunity for them to work for Christ. Liberia was the first foreign mission field of the Methodist Episcopal Church. . . . The development of West Africa, and the improvement as to health conditions and government in Liberia, have made it possible to inaugurate an advanced movement in every department of the work. To-day Liberia is one of the most hopeful of our foreign mission fields. Our greatest need is an increase in the number of intelligent leaders. Some of these can be taken from America, but the hope there, as in every foreign field, is in the raising up of intelligent and aggressive leadership on the ground. We now have over twelve hundred pupils in our thirty-four schools, the center of which is our College of West Africa, Monrovia. The outlook in our native heathen work in Liberia is very encouraging. . . Our West Central Africa Mission Conference, starting from St. Paul de Loanda, two thousand miles south of Liberia, a city on the coast of eighteen thousand people, has a territory of nearly three hundred thousand square miles where ours are the only Protestant missionaries. The natives are of a high type. Livingstone said that they and their language were among the best he had met with in Africa. There is an opportunity to add to our property a splendid lot and large building adjoining our present property at St. Paul de Loanda at less than half its cost. The province of Angola has a great future. Our inland stations are more than five thousand feet above the sea. With that additional property at the capital city, we have a base of operations through which to command that enormous territory for generations to come. At Malange, more than three hundred miles interior, we are struggling to complete our mission building, and we must have a chapel. The railroad is within seventy-five miles, and this will be a great commercial center for many years to come, to which multiplied thousands of native carriers will come from the far interior to exchange their goods. At Quessua, five miles distant, we have a large tract of land with a splendid mountain stream running13through it, affording water for irrigation and water power. Here is our opportunity for a large industrial mission station, which can rapidly develop, and in time become self-supporting. Here we must have a mission building and chapel. In all these buildings much iron must be used as a matter of economy. Once built they will abide, while wooden buildings are destroyed by the white ants. In the East Central Africa Mission Conference the large donation from the British South Africa Company gives us good buildings, which, with some repairs, ought to last many years. At New Umtali a great opening has come not only among the natives, but among the Europeans. This is the only important European center in eastern Rhodesia. It is over two hundred miles from the coast, lies among the mountains, and will be the third important center of white population in all Rhodesia. It had six hundred white people at the beginning of the war, and will soon have many more with the restoration of peace. It lies in a rich mining and agricultural section. Here we have the beginning of a good European church. Our school numbers fifty scholars, and in the very near future will develop into a seminary where white teachers and missionaries can be trained for Africa. I have a standing offer that the government will bear half the expense of a school building, the property all to belong to the church. Beira, on the east coast, is to be a large city and seaport, from which the railroad now extends four hundred miles inland, soon to connect with the line from the Cape to Cairo, and open up vast regions for commercial enterprise and settlement. There is no church in this growing city. This is the natural seaport for American Methodism on the east coast. Ethiopia is indeed, as never before, stretching out her hands unto God.