King's Business - 1917-09

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THE' KING’S BUSINESS

work has been accomplished by the native under the supervision of the missionary. THE PHILIPPINES Work begins at the training school in Iloilo at the unpopular hour of 3:50 a. m. and continues long after the eight hour day has been completed—and yet the school is filled to overflowing! We may perhaps understand why our missionaries' have to beg, borrow or buy automobiles to use in their evangelistic tours after learning that on a Sunday preaching trip, Rev. H. W. Munger and his assistants rode ten miles in a one- seated ox cart which went at the rate of a mile and a quarter an hour. Mr. Munger suggests that the ox may have remembered that it was Sunday. Immigrants to Read the Bible | A new distinction for the Bible is the adoption of it by the United States Immi­ gration Bureau as the book on which each incoming alien will be tested to. see if he can meet the requirement of the latest immigration law for ability to read in at least his native language. The bureau chief is at pains to explain that he-has not thus selected the Bible for any religious reason, but merely because it is the one book avail­ able in all the divers tongues and dialects spoken by the multitudes who knock at America’s gates. Moreover, the Bible is always translated into common rather than literary speech, and those who can read at all cannot fail to manage its simpler passages. But no Christian citizen will con­ sider it altogether an incidental and unim­ portant thing that at the moment of intro­ duction to, his new homeland the arriving stranger is to find the Bible the first book put in his hands by representatives of the American government. And the passages chosen for the reading test may well leave a lasting influence on the mind of the new settler in America. Progress Unabated It is heartening to know that the most

rapid gains in receipts which the Foreign Society has made for a long time, have been during the months of May and June of this year in the midst of the war situ­ ation. It is our belief that the suffering to which we havfe been called as a nation will lead our people to greater devotion in the Lord’s work. Rapidly Passing Forty million heathen die every year. They are dying at the rate of 100,000 a day. Every tick of the clock sounds the death of a human soul. At every breath we draw, four souls perish, never having heard of Christ. Christians are giving at the rate of one-tenth of a cent a day. We give 1 cent a year for each heathen soul. Christ said, “Go ye into all the world.” “Go,” does not mean stay. “All,” does not mean a part. Every Christian must account to God for the amount of mis­ sionary work he did or neglects to do. Head Hunters in School Bitter rebels against the government, a fierce and bloodthirsty tribe of head­ hunters, nomadic, yet hard-working, the Dyaks of Borneo are the last people one would think of as going docilely to school. Nevertheless, a group of Dyak boys are now studying the Dyak and English lan­ guages, drawing, woodwork, gardening and drill in the Methodist mission school at Sarawak, Borneo. The first step was taken when a Dyak chief paid the missionaries a ceremonious , visit and asked them to travel up his riyer so that he might be protected against evil birds, dreams and spirits; and how their astonishment grew when he came again and said that his peopel wanted to follow the white man’s customs and wished to send to the sdhool a few boys of the tribe. Three boys came, then suddenly disappeared, to return later with four comrades—seven boys straight from the jungle and jungle life, with long bushy hair that had never known a comb,

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