A Special Agency in the Field for Foreign Missions
By W. A. S.
However many languages the mind may hold and use in business or social intercourse, the language of the heart and soul, generally speaking, remains the mother tongue. Many a man who talks the tongue of an adopted country freely, prefers to pray to God in the tongue which he learned at his mother’s knee. The language in which his first religious impressions were received is the one that helps him to be again a little child talking to a loving Father in heaven. This is why many of those who well understand English for ordinary uses need to hear the message for this time in their own mother tongue. This has the power to touch the heart and awaken the spiritual nature. Religious thought means more in this than any other. There are millions of these adopted children of the New World, representing all the leading languages of Europe, scattered over America. For those who are learning English for business purposes, and for the vast multitudes who can read only in their own tongue, the new International Publishing Association, of College View, is to do a special work. This movement has come none too soon. The message is quickly to be carried to every nation and tongue. As at Jerusalem there were gathered people from all the regions round about to hear the truth proclaimed at Pentecost, each in his own tongue, so Providence has brought these millions of other tongues to this land to hear the final message. Then as the showers of the latter rain fall, and the crisis breaks upon this land, multitudes will go out to other lands across the seas, bearing the closing message in many languages. Many fields abroad in which little or nothing is being done for lack of workers able to speak the languages, are represented by thousands of sons and daughters who have come to the New World to seek their fortunes or a livelihood. God has brought them to our own doors so that we may tell them the truth. Among these we shall certainly find true men and women who can go back to their home people to tell what God has done for them. The time is fully ripe for a far more definitely aimed and sustained effort for the foreign-speaking communities in our midst. The influence of the work done will react upon the vast fields over the seas. Our European publishing centers propose to co-operate with the new association in a really strong effort to place our literature in the homes of our foreign-speaking population. Europe proposes to supply a tried man to assist in an Eastern agency, so that between College View and New York every consistent provision may be made to develop the work. In the offering for the College View Association to be taken on Sabbath, February 6, we are not lifting on any merely local missionary enterprise. It is a move that is to provide a new and strong facility for hastening forward the evangelization of all the world in this generation. This is the one work before us. Let us make the offering all that it should be, and let us all carry a more thoughtful burden for the strangers within the gates of this land where God has placed us. W. A. S.