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ING THE WORLD

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of the world. For almost two thousand years the borders of Christendom have been expanding and Christians have dreamed of a time when there would be no more heathen lands. Now they are setting about the realization of their dreams and are pouring men and money into China, India, Africa, and all other heathen lands. It is a movement which has been gaining momentum for centuries, attracting a constantly widening circle of support until now it is aided with equal

AN ENGLISH CHURCH IN INDIA THE METHODIST EPISCOPAL MISSION CHURCH AT HYDERABAD

enthusiasm by school children who give their pennies to the mission societies and by captains of industry who find in foreign missions work a subject big enough to command their keenest interest. The missionary workers are changing the religious map of the world so rapidly that some of them now look forward confidently to the time when their ideal will be accomplished and the brotherhood of man will have a new

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AT THE HEART OF THE WAR WITH MOHAMMEDANISM FOLLOWERS OF THE PROPHET AT PRAYER BEFORE THE MOSQUE IN DELHI, INDIA

China; their hospitals have saved the lives of hundreds of thousands, and educated ten times as many more. They are far in advance of the traders in the dark places of the world, teaching the barbarian how to contribute his share to commerce and civilization.

A little less than a thousand years ago devout but often unholy adventurers led bands of nominal Christians into the lands of the heathen to rescue the Holy Grail and to restore the Holy Sepulchre to Christian ownership. For almost two centuries crusading, and the cracking of heathen heads, was the sport of Europe. Millions of dollars were spent and millions of lives lost, largely to give Jews and Moslems an abiding reason for the hatred of all things Christian. Much heathen

loot was brought back to the adornment of European cathedrals. But the heathen are still in possession of the Holy Land, and this effort of the Church in arms left no impression. Then the grand folly of the crusades ended and the Christians quarreled among themselves while the heathen continued to grow in numbers and in strength. After a time the Roman Catholic church entered the mission field with an evangelizing army which has never deserted though it was alone in the work for centuries. The Protestant denominations declined to be interested in foreign missions.

It is only a little more than a hundred years ago that William Carey, the English cobbler who aroused the present interest of Protestant churches in foreign mis

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CHRISTIAN CONVERTS WAITING FOR BAPTISM

PART OF A CONGREGATION OF 1,700 PEOPLE IN THE GUZERAT DISTRICT OF INDIA

sions, had the effrontery to enquire at a Baptist assembly if Christ's command to the apostles to go "into all the world and preach the gospel" did not apply at that time. The president curtly replied:

"Sit down, young man; when it pleases God to convert the heathen, He will do it without your help."

A little later the proposal to send missionaries to India was met by the ultimatum that the Honorable East India Company considered "the sending out of missionaries into our Eastern possessions to be the maddest, most extravagant, most costly, most indefensible project which has ever been suggested by a moonstruck religious fanatic. Such a scheme is pernicious, imprudent, useless, harmful, dangerous, profitless, fantastic.

It

strikes against all reason and sound policy, it brings the peace and safety of our possessions into peril." The author of such an opinion would be laughed at to-day, but a century ago there were few people to disagree.

At this time there was opposition to the missionary movement outside, and indifference to it inside the church circles. When the Church Missionary Society of London was organized by a few pioneers, it could find no English clergymen willing to go on foreign mission work, and for sixteen years was represented only by foreigners. In 1796 the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland passed a resolution that "to spread abroad the knowledge of the gospel amongst barbarous and heathen nations seems to be highly pre

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JAPANESE CHILDREN IN A CHRISTIAN KINDERGARTEN AT KANAZAWA

sionary Society was established in London in 1799; the British and Foreign Bible Society followed in 1804; the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in 1810, and in 1814 the organization which later became known as the Baptist Missionary Union, though for a good many years it labored under the long name; "The General Convention of the Baptist Denomination in the United States of America for Foreign Missions and other Important Objects Relating to the Redeemer's Kingdom."

amounting to $1,000, and in 1813 the whole amount spent on foreign missions by all the Protestant churches in the world did not exceed $200,000. In 1819. so feeble was the interest that the American contributions to foreign missions amounted to only $37,521, a sum less than that now annually given by Christian organizations in lands which were totally heathen at that time.

In 1812 the first five missionaries sailed from America, their objective point being India, where for months they were shifted

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