In Papal Lands | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · Oct 30, 1907

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 33, No. 44.

In Papal Lands.

Papal lands also present an open door. Here for many centuries the Protestant missionary has been as effectually shut out as from any part of the heathen world. Fifty years ago, whoever expected to see Italy free to the Gospel, and even the Eternal City occupied by forty Protestant centers? Or the land of the Inquisition permitting Bible-carts on the streets of Madrid? What a marvelous work Robert W. McAll did from 1872 when he opened his first “salle” in Belleville until twenty years later when failing health drove him to England! Think of one man establishing a chain of 130 stations from Paris to Rome, and of the French Government making this Protestant worker a knight of the Legion of Honor, and giving him permission from time to time for a new “salle,” on the same principle as establishing a new police station in the interests of law and order!

South America and Central America likewise challenge the Protestant missionary to take possession. What changes since the days of Allen Gardiner in Tierra del Fuego, and Matilda Rankin on the Mexican border! The whole of the Neglected Continent is before the Christian church, from the Gulf to the Cape. Think of the great Argentine Republic with its 1,600,000 square miles and 3,000,000 people; of Brazil with twice the territory and four times the population; of the twelve other States, averaging about 300,000 square miles and a population of a million and a half, and with few if any obstacles to surmount, except the barriers of sin everywhere to be met.