King's Business - 1913-11

At Home and Abroad

Politically, socially and religiously the immigrant affects us and we affect him. Whether his ideal? or ours are to dom­ inate is already an open question. Is immigration a blessing or a menace? Shall it be further restricted? Does the Church yet understand the immigrant? Is it adequately dealing with the immigration problem;? Questions like these are already confronting the young people and with them the answers will largely rest. The Home Mission Campaign of the fall of 1913 will do much more than uncover facts and conditions. It will definitely change the attitude of thousands of people toward our immigrant neighbors and will directly affect the policy and life of our country. Missionary: “Have you never had a taste of civilization?” Chief of Cannibals: “Oh, yes! The last ship that stopped here left a barrel of it, but it’s all gone now.” This is more pathetic than humorous because of its truth—-“one missionary on the deck and a hundred kegs of rum in the hold.” Mr. Payne, a missionary in Shanshi, re­ ports finding a group of Chinese coal min­ ers, meeting occasionally to study a smoke- begrimed Gospel of Mark, dated 1864. Bought by the father of one of them years ago, it still serves for instruction where no missionary has yet come. The American Methodists are to make Delhi, the old Mogul capital, a sort of capital of Indian Methodism. They have applied for fifteen acres of land in the new city, where they intend to establish educa­ tional and training institutions and homes for missionaries. There are already in and around Delhi 9000 Methodist Christians. Mr. Broomhall of the C. I. M. estimates that for the province of Shansi one life has been laid down for every twenty-five or thirty converts who have been gathered into the Christian Church in that province. And this of foreigners alone, not of Chinese.

We may certainly look for a rich harvest of souls in Shansi, sooner or later. Superintendent Sam Higginbottom of the leper asylum at Allahabad, India, whose work was described in The- Continent of October 2, is vastly rejoiced at receiving from the British government in India a grant of $1500 which will supplement a re­ cent appropriation from the leper commit­ tee sufficiently to provide a suitable and sanitary new barracks building for the 250 lepers now crowding the asylum. There is a trade school for destitute boys at Ichang (China) which is rescuing many beggar bOys from lives of misery and vice. The initial impulse to its establishment came from a Chinese pastor who had read the life of Doctor Barnardo. Bishop Hunting- ton writes: “It has done more to create a favorable impression of Christianity than any other work we have undertaken.” In two and a half years the Rev. Mr. Blackstone and his friends have circulated 28,000,000 copies of Christian tracts and portions of the Scriptures in China —5,428,- 300 of them were in Mandarin and Wenli editions of “Only One God,” 17,640,000 il­ lustrated portionettes in Mandarin and Wenli, 250,000 large _ posters, 1,900,000 copies of the tract, “Truth Sought and Found.” Professor Squires of the University of North Dakota deserves the title of “moral inventor” which Cotter Morison was wont to use in describing reformers. He con­ ceived the plan of giving credit to pupils in high schools for Bible study carried on systematically in church and Sunday school. The plan is working out admirably in the state high school. ^A syllabuses used which covers a two years’ course: written ex­ aminations are set by the’state board as for other studies. The idea is being taken up with eagerness throughout .the state. A business man of Atlanta, Georgia, re­ cently told a friend of ours that his firm had given $5,000 to oppose the adoption of

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