A t Home and Abroad
Eleven hundred hospitals and dispensaries are being maintained on the foreign field by the Protestant boards and they treat, yearly, 3,000,000 patients. The late Mr. J, S. Fry, the English cocoa manufacturer, bequeathed 149,000 pounds to charities, 43,000 pounds of this being for foreign missions. Mr. Fry was a member o f the Society of Friends. “ A cigarette in the mouth of every man, woman and child in, China” is the watch word of one of the big Anglo-American tobacco companies. When the Christians held their first service at the Altar of Heaven in Peking, agents of the tobacco companies were selling cigarettes at this same Holy of Holies. Bishop Sumner’s. Meditation on Israel-. ‘'Behold this nation to whom I owe so much, without the hope which, through their means, I am blessed with! Let me hold up to them the Word of Ljfe, if God peradventure may have mercy upon them and disperse the blindness which has hap pened unto Israel.” It is gratifying to find such illustrations o f the spirit of Japanese Christianity as the following : Mr. Naito, pastor of one of the largest and strongest Presbyterian churches of Kobe, has resigned his pastor ate and taken oyer a city chapel with the purpose of bringing it to self-support dur ing the present year. Mission work for the Jews of Smyrna has been interfered with by large emigra tion to South America in order to escape Turkish opposition. The schools still have three hundred and fifty, scholars, for whom prayers are asked, since, like the early Church in that city, Christians must endure the “ revilings of them which say they are Jews, and they are not, but are a syna gogue of Satan.” Rabi Tuma, who has been doing work for missions in the outstations of Urumia, sends
the following as his report for four months’ w ork: "Passing through the fields have stopped and talked with some sixteen men on re ligion; in the vineyards I have had con versation with twenty men; on the thresh ing floors with twelve men; in the mills with seven; and along the road as I walked from village to village, have had conversa tion with fifty-one men. Have visited fifty villages and talked with 700 men in three months.” At the last Indian student camp in Rafa- mundy one hundred arid fifty young Chris tian men were present,'nine-tenths of them being o f depressed caste lineage. They rep resent the flower of the Telugu Christian Church. One of the one hundred and fifty, however, is a Brahmin. Shortly after he was baptized his father happened to nieet him in the bazaar, stopped and spit in his face. The son is now working for the elevation of the classes whom the father would not let stand in his shadow. Robert Morrison was the pioneer mission ary to China. He was the son of a Scotch maker o f lasts. He went to China in 1807. It is a famous reply of his, when some one asked him if he really expected to make an impression on the idolatry of the great Chinese Empire, “ Nor, sir; I ex pect that God will.” He won his first con vert after seven years of labor, and he won only ten converts in all; but his work, including his Bible translation and his great dictionary of the language, was a broad foundation on which the present missions to China have been built. In one of his missionary tours Peter Cameron Scott, missionary to Africa, gives a most touching description of what was ac complished after having preached Jesus for nearly two hours or more. A very old heathen man, having most attentively lis tened, came tottering up to where he stood, and after asking a few most searching ques tions, became somewhat satisfied that the blood of Jesus could even cleanse away his
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