ANOTHER STEP FORWARD

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Feb 24, 1904

ANOTHER STEP FORWARD.

From The Missionary Review of the World we take the following interesting report from Japan:—

The friends of missions know how much trouble has been experienced in Japan in reference to the holding of mission property, inasmuch as by Japanese law foreigners could not legally acquire real estate. In view of this difficulty, our Japan Mission (Congregational) has, after protracted effort, secured legal incorporation, with full permission for the new corporation to hold real or personal estate in the empire. All members of the mission may be chosen as incorporators, and hereafter all property that may be desired may be secured and held with a clear title, which none can question.

Once more has God given to His church an open door in Japan. For some years, while it has appeared to be open, it was but an outer door. Following the early promise of our mission work, which encouraged the hope of a speedy evangelization of the islands, and led to the earnest, but almost vain, appeal to the church to seize the fleeting opportunity, came the reaction toward a rationalistic theology, invertebrate and nerveless, which threatened to kill the native church by stopping its aggressive efforts, and to destroy all outside interest by its failure to offer anything better than the old ethical philosophies. The past year a general discontent with existing conditions, an awakening of the Japanese to a realization of the insufficiency of their own systems, together with other causes, led to the inauguration of the Twentieth Century Special Union Evangelistic Movement, in which the different denominations have co-operated. Conducted in a large measure by the natives themselves, with the aid and counsel of the missionaries, this evangelistic campaign, begun in the spring of 1901, and resumed in the fall of the same year, has resulted in twenty thousand inquirers of all ranks and conditions, exclusive of the one thousand four hundred students who expressed a purpose to begin a Christian life. The end is not.

The attempt of the Conservative party to exclude Christianity from the education of Japan has failed. The new educational code, backed by imperial rescript, had but a temporary triumph, and once more our schools are free to teach Christian truth. The latest news from Japan is almost the best of all. The native leaders in theological thought have come out clearly and strongly in a declaration of their loyalty to the Word of God as the only infallible rule of faith and practise, and to Jesus Christ as the divine Son of God.