King's Business - 1914-05

THE KING’S BUSINESS

291

eign service, but a band of “Mountain Vol­ unteers,” definitely preparing for religious work in Appalachian America. These last are already active in Sunday school work in the vicinity of Berea. Drummers and cattlemen who traverse the mountains re­ port the activity of Berean students in all religious uplift in the most remote coun­ ties. A thousand mountain mothers were represented by the one who said: “We don’t know what you do to our young men in Berea, but they go there carrying re­ volvers and come back with Testaments.” I n the New York meeting “Billy” spared no one. He gave it to them right and left. Preachers, as well as others, “got it straight from the shoulder.” No one can listen to “Billy” without discovering his ability as a thinker and a sermonizer. Then, too, his scholarship is not of the “non est” persua­ sion. While he gets out of a text far more than the average student would be apt to see in it, nevertheless he is an exegete in the right sense. He does not burden the Truth with his own theories. If a sermon is an organism genetically evolved from a text, “Billy’s” addresses are really sermons. Then, too, lie sticks to the Bible. On that he is most dogmatic and intense. He has no use, he frequently avers, for the so- called “Higher Critic.” He is equaly “down” on every “fadism.” He slashes “Christian Science,” “Polygamy,” “Sun-worshipers,' and all “Science falsely so-called,” without mercy.— R ev. A lexa n d er A lison, D . D. T h e R escue H ome for Chinese girls in San Francisco has had during’the year as many as seventy girls at a time in resi­ dence. The San Francisco Japanese Church has been in existence more than a quarter of a century and, as a memorial of this fact, Japanese of the city have founded a library for their countrymen, to bear the name of the superintendent of the Presbyterian mission. Twenty-one hun­

dred volumes in English and Japanese form the nucleus of this collection. They are to be circulated among the Japanese in camps and country places where good read­ ing is not easily procurable. T h e R ev . E rnest H all , of Korea, writes that the secret of the rapid growth of the Church there is the same as in the apos­ tolic days: (1) The power of the Holy Spirit in the witnessing of disciples by life and lips, and (2) the scattering of Christians everywhere to plant the Gospel seed in other hearts. Mr. Hall says : “The Koreans are taught that every Christian must become a missionary to his or her own people, in that he must tell the story of Christ’s1 love to those who have never heard it. When a man asks for admission to the Church, he is asked if he has done this, and if not, is kept waiting until he can give evidence of the vitality of his Christianity. As a result the missionaries are frequently asked to go to places they have never visited and there organize churches from disciples won by a. native Christian.” T h e im m e n s e value of medical missions appears from the following: A medical missionary in Bengal, some time ago, found on enquiry that while a dozen catechists, working from seven centers, preached the Gospel in 401 villages within the year, the hospital and dispensary in the same year at­ tracted patients from 517 villages. Very often when the medical missionary is on a tour the people who come to his tent for medicine, and there hear the Gospel, are more numerous than those he and his preachers would reach by spending the whole day in visiting the villages. The selling of Scriptures is usually carried on in connection with medical work, and in some places more books are sold in hospital and dispensary than by all other means combined.

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