CHINA, THE MISSIONARY FIELD OF THE WORLD.
By Austia Patterson
One of the things which impresses the traveler in the “far east” is eyes—eyes everywhere. You step out into the street, and in a moment hundreds of eyes are upon you, and as you proceed, they increase, until they seem innumerable. Every door, window, crevice, and even the roofs of the houses have eyes peering at you. Therefore, China is the mission field of the world. 1. Because of its teeming millions. The density of the population is everywhere impressed upon the sojourner in the “Flowery Kingdom.” Whole families, of perhaps nine members, live in a little boat twelve feet long by six feet broad, and have no other home. Numbers can adjust themselves to a small amount of space and be satisfied. In the country a missionary stood up in his boat and counted three hundred villages within the scope of his unaided vision. Clustered so thickly are they that a colporter can visit from ten to twenty in a single day. Place the population of Africa and India in a territory about the size of the United States, and you have about the conditions of China. 2. Because of their strength of character and general worth. Their muscular power and endurance of toil and hardship are most remarkable, and they possess almost, at times, a stoical indifference to physical suffering. They are bright, skillful, and active, and have wonderful mental ability; a nation civilized, though heathen, where scholarship is made the test of political preferment—where the scholar is the aristocrat, although he may not have a “cash” in his pocket or know where his next dish of rice is to come from; men whose convictions of duty and right are and have been so strong for centuries as to have become almost petrifactions; a people whose ability to rule is second only to their love of ordering other people about. Their perceptions are rapid; they are quick to learn trades, and can easily become adepts in anything, from the digging in the mud after lotus roots to ably discharging the duties of the chief official position in the Celestial Empire itself. 3. Because of her undeveloped resources. China is well supplied with material in the rough, like the immense amount of mineral in her hills—enough coal alone, it is said, to supply the world for twenty centuries. But much of her latent power is yet undeveloped. A few are coming to see the real power in this nation; but as yet the little band of workers are only as tiny pebbles in the mighty torrent, and they must be backed by thousands of others before its course is eventually turned in the right direction—away from their idols and superstition toward Christ.—United Brethren Quarterly Review.