King's Business - 1915-01

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THE KING’S BUSINESS

vinces, the increases are one hundred and thirty-six, eighty-nine and seventy-five per cent, respectively. T he largest publishing house in the Orient is the Commercial Press, Limited, with head office in Shanghai and branches in more than 1000 cities. The managers are active Christians, stockholders all in smypathy with Christianity, and the bus­ iness is conducted on the principle of giv­ ing the largest possible amount of help to Christian work. A few months ago a mis­ sionary directed the attention of the pub­ lishers to an apparent insinuation against Christianity in one of the text-books then being issued. The appeal to’ stand by their principles had its answer in the publishers’ immediate, withdrawal of the entire edition for revision. “We have always intended to be a help to Christianity, not a hind­ rance,” declared one of these Chinese bus­ iness men, “and we hold to it, though it means in this instance a financial loss.” A ll who share the compassion of the Patriot (Jesus) who loved this land of Palestine unto tears must be moved deeply by present conditions, as intensified by war. Consider the Jews, nine-tenths of them aged, who have returned to the land of promise in order to enjoy the blessedness of dying on the soil of the covenant. Some of them will have that boon prematurely granted them, if the stories of starvation that are coming out of Jerusalem be true. These Jews subsist meagerly on a “por­ tion ’ from benevolent fellow religionists over seas. Ordinarily their lot is one of poverty. Now, with communications cut, banks closed, and government scrip re­ fused, they are in a sorry plight indeed. The Friday throngs at the ancient Wailing Place, by the remaining stones of Solo­ mon’s teinple, show more misery than ever. N ietzsche , the Germa atheistic philoso­ pher, substiutes the following for the Beati­ tudes of the Gospel: Xe have heard how in old tim es it was

“The fatal defect in the teaching of the great sages of Japan and China is, that while they deal with virtue and morals, they do not sufficiently dwell on the spirit­ ual nature of men ; and, any nation that neglects the spiritual, though it may flour­ ish for a time, must eventually decay. The origin of modern civilization is to be found in the teachings of the sage of Judea, by whom alone the necessary moral dynamic is supplied.” At a gathering of three hun­ dred officers of the army at Himiji, Count Okuma said to them that the strength of a nation was not to be measured by the size of the army or the number of its battle­ ships, but by the moral power that is sup­ plied in the religion of Jesus Christ. T he late Dr. T. L. Pennell, of Bannu, tells of Abdul Karim, a baptized Christian, who ventured alone into Afghanistan with the Message. He was dragged to Kabul as a prisoner, laden with chains, was dis­ missed with a soldier guard to go back to India, was waylaid in a cave and told, “You shall revoke your belief; you shall say with your own lips, Mohammed is God’s apos­ tle.” He replied, “I will never say it.” They cut off his right hand. He repeated, “I will never gay it,” and they cut off his left hand; and then, while he still wit­ nessed, they pulled out his tongue, but he still tried to mutter, “Jesus Christ, my Lord.” Then he died .—The Missionary Re­ view. — T he total number of Christians in India at the time of the census (1911) was 3,876,- 203, or twelve per mile of the population. During the decade since the preyious cen­ sus, the increase was thirty-two and six­ teenths per cent, and the number of Chris­ tians has more than doubled since 1881. The proportional increase, by the way, is by far the greatest in the Punjab, where there are now three times as many Chris­ tians as there were in 1901; in the Central Provinces and Berar the increase is one hundred and sixty-nine per cent, and pi Hyderabad; Assam and the United Pro­

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