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Signs of Promise in China.

all comers. The illustration on the previous page shows the barrow and one of Brother Brown's assistants. The inscription over the barrow reads, "Jesus Doctrine Books.” Brother Brown writes: "Thousands of pilgrims from all quarters come to worship at this sacred pile of rock,' and we are delighted to believe that many have heard the Gospel and have carried away many of our tracts and books to their distant homes. Our district tract wheelbarrow stood at the base of the mountain, and, as the weary, foot-sore pilgrims passed, thousands of volumes were sold." May the seed bear abundant fruit.

Within the bounds of the district is a large city called Chi-ning-chou.

We have

been trying to gain a foothold there for years, but the literati have been very hostile. Some years ago, as an entering wedge, we opened a little bookstore on a quiet street, where we sold scientific works as well as Scriptures and tracts. But two years ago we were driven out of the city, and our shop was sealed up.

Last fall, after the imperial edict tolerating Christianity had been issued, Mr. H. H. Lowry and Mr. Brown went to the city and called on the new official. They were well received. The magistrate himself procured the key and reopened our bookstore. After their return a good piece of property inside the East Gate was bought at a low figure, because it was "haunted." It was bought by telegraph. Think of that for conservative China! It was once an official residence. The "haunted" portion we have made into a native parsonage.

Mr. Brown says: "The new official, who was sent after the riot, has treated us well. He gave us a feast, issued a proclamation, and has done everything in his power for us. An extract from a letter just received from him will show the kindly feeling he manifests toward us. Said letter is addressed to 'Bishop' Brown, and contains his thanks for the present of a cheap watch, which I sent him as an expression of my gratitude for his kindness. He says: The watch you so kindly sent me represents twelve hours. It is not an exaggeration to state that I think of you each of the twelve.' Though the distance between Chi-ning-chou and Tientsin [where Mr. Brown lives] is one thousand li [Chinese miles], our hearts are knit together as the heart of one man.' If these extracts are of no other value, they show that a great change has taken place. Two years ago the city was in a state of riot; officials and people opposed to us; now the highest official treats us more kindly than our most sanguine expectations. To God be the praise!"

At An-chia-chuang, the oldest circuit on the district, we have taken an advance step. Mrs. Gamewell offered them thirty dollars a year if they would open a girls' boarding school. A committee of five church members, including the pastor, chosen by the members on the circuit, were to have entire charge of the school. They wrote an agreement, pledging the churches on the circuit to provide the schoolroom and furniture, food and fuel, and to keep at least ten girls in school for ten months. The wife of the pastor gave her services as teacher. When Brother Brown visited the school, six months after its opening, he found twelve girls had been enrolled, and eight then present passed good examinations in their studies. Besides this several girls, without urging, have unbound their feet. The church members contributed thirteen hundredweight of grain, seven hundredweight of vegetables, and a like quantity of fuel. One member gave a room for the school, and others loan tables and benches.

In this spirit of self-help we rejoice, and they are pleased themselves. The native pastor said, while his fat, round face beamed with satisfaction: "We did not think it could succeed."

So the cause of God advances, a step here and another there. While it may seem slow to impatient minds, we glory in the fact that "our God is marching on" in China.

THE CHINESE A GREAT PEOPLE.

BY REV. S. C. GIBSON.

(Extract from an Address at the Anniversary of the British and Foreign Bible Society in 1892.)

SPEAK on behalf of a great people. You little know how great they are. You are gladdened when you hear of some speck upon the purple ocean whose few hundreds of inhabitants have received at your hands the word of life. What, then, when I speak to you of the magnificent empire and of the magnificent people of China? It is an empire that stretches from ice-bound regions of almost arctic cold to the sunny lands of the tropics, and from the fertile shores of the bright Pacific to the mighty and unscaled masses of the mountains of Central Asia. And over all that vast domain you have four hundred millions of people who crowd its cities and till its soil, the strongest, most intelligent, and most industrious of all the Eastern races. They planted their great empire a thousand years before the foundations of Rome were laid, and now, more than a thousand years after her glory has departed, and after the great city, "lone mother of dead empires," has sunk into decay, their empire stands before the world the greatest wonder and the greatest problem of the nineteenth century, extended, consolidated, and secure, alone and unrivaled, the one great non-Christian empire of the modern world.

They stand there bracing themselves to-day for new efforts in the face of new conditions. Their emperor is learning English. They are coming into contact with our Western civilization. They are adopting our steamships, our railways, our telegraphs. They are inquiring into our political constitutions and our social life. In all departments they are preparing to learn from us in order that they may maintain themselves as the equals and the rivals of the greatest Western powers. Therefore, it becomes doubly urgent that we should, at the beginning of this new and grand career upon which they are to launch, present to them the word of God-which is the secret of our greatness and the only secret of its permanence. They have made for themselves a great literature and have built up great systems of philosophy and law. Their sages have disciplined themselves in ethics and statesmanship; their toiling millions in industry and commerce. They wait for only one thing to make them the greatest of all people, the joy of the whole world. They are still in the bondage of heathenism; they

lack the Gospel of Christ.

If they have been so grand a people without the Gospel, what will they be if we give to them the Gospel-which will cleanse the corrupted administration of justice throughout all their land; which will regenerate their national life; which will purify their homes and purge them of what is cruel and vile; which will dignify their manhood and renew the energies of the individual life? If we put the Gospel into the hands of China, you will see her no longer as a dead mass on the far limits of the East, alien to our sympathies, strange in her methods of thought and life, but you will see her the very vanguard of the Church of God, the noblest battalion in the armies of the Lord of hosts; and that glorious vision-which always floats before the eyes of a Chinese missionary, which is coming nearer and nearer to its fulfillment every year—is surely one for which we and this Bible Society should pray and toil together, and count no toil too great if we can, by the blessing of God, hasten its coming by even a single day.

THE Chinese sage Mencius taught: "Benevolence is the distinguishing characteristic of man. As embodied in his conduct, it may be called the path of duty."

WORSHIP OF KWANON, THE QUEEN OF HEAVEN. NCE a year the people about Swatow, in China, go to a temple on a small island near by to worship the Chinese "queen of heaven," to whom mercantile men think they owe their success upon sea and land. Miss Daniels, a missionary at Swatow, who visited the temple, describes as follows the temple, the idol, and the worship:

"The temple dedicated to the goddess stands high, and is reached by a flight of

Worship of Kwanon, the Queen of Heaven.

57

stone steps. It is highly ornamented in flowers, fowls, fishes, and beasts, the ridgepole being crowned by a great dragon. A noisy theater operates a few feet in front of the steps, and on all sides are people with tables for supplying food or mock moneyGoing up the steps one sees directly in front of the temple an altar for making offerings to the spirits of such of the departed as have no children to worship them. To the right of this is a huge paper image, its head as high as the top of the temple, its face and hands as hideous as you can imagine. This is the ruler of these departed spirits, and it is his duty to settle disagreements among those spirits who are inclined to quarrel. To the left of the altar is a furnace, in which bushels of ashes and embers show that during the past two days great quantities of mock money have been offered.

"Within the temple, at the farther end, sits the goddess in her chair, with a heavy canopy above, all elaborately wrought in silk. With her attendant. on either side she is quite unmindful of the earnestness with which two devotees are tossing their bamboo slips, eagerly watching for the favorable position of one black and one white side up, to show that their petition will be granted. In front of the goddess is a row of three altars, each about ten feet long and three wide. One is covered with lighted tapers and incense pots, in which incense sticks are burning, filling the building with smoke. The others are loaded with mock money and all kinds of food brought for offerings. Here are the entire heads of swine stained a bright pink and roasted, fowls of all kinds, fish of all kinds, and the best of fruits, all of which are offered, then taken home and eaten by the family.

SHRINE OF KWANON.

"Beyond these altars are mats upon which the worshipers kneel after having made their offerings; and gongs are beaten with a deafening noise while they prostrate themselves before the idol.

"We turn aside and wander a short distance from the temple, where we find a number of women whom we tell of our God. Some listen, others examine our dress and inquire after our families. When we ask them regarding their worship, the greater number acknowledge that the goddess can hear nothing, can say nothing, and can in no way help them, and they worship because it is their custom. Others say they did not come to worship, but are out for pleasure; others hold that the goddess does help them. Thus, we spend four hours talking with these poor women; and hope that some may have heard the Gospel, to accept it in the future."

CONFUCIUS, the great Chinese sage, who lived five hundred years before Christ, said: "Learning undigested by thought, is labor lost; thought, unassisted by learning, is perilous. What the superior man seeks is in himself; what the small man seeks is in others. The superior man is dignified, and does not wrangle; social, but not a partisan. He does not promote a man because of his words, nor put good words aside because of the man."

CHIINA AS A PROTESTANT MISSION FIELD.

BY REV. WILLIAM ASHMORE, D.D., OF SWATOw.

BELIEVE that China is the greatest and most important mission field in the world, and here are some of my reasons for saying so:

I. The empire of China lies in what people in Western lands would call "the zone of power." It covers a great area between great cold and great heat. It has a Mississippi valley of its own, with a soil rich and fertile, with mineral supplies inexhaustible beneath. The Creator has stored away for coming use enormous resources. This is a land of brooks of water, of fountains and depths, that spring out of valleys and hills; a land of wheat and barley, and vines and fig trees, and oranges and sugar cane; a land of olive oil and honey; a land where stones are iron, and out of whose hills you may dig brass. It is the zone of the greatest productive richness; the zone of the highest possibilities of development, as writers on such subjects would say in America when talking of capabilities of races.

II. China contains a vastly greater multitude of people than any other single mission field of the world-100,000,000 more than all India; 300,000,000 more than all Central Africa; 300,000,000 more than all Polynesia, and at least 360,000,000 more than Assam, Burma, and Siam combined. It has single provinces larger than two or three ordinary Western kingdoms put together, and populations in some of these single provinces to exceed that of a European empire.

III. The three hundred and eighty odd millions of China are all of one family -stock-a homogeneous people with one written language, and one literature, and one religion, and one code of laws, and one governmental administration, and one system of usages, and one social order. All read the same books; and though there are variations of dialect, yet no less than one hundred and fifty millions of them use one dialect in common. Work on such a people will in the end go farther and count for more than among smaller nations and disintegrated tribes.

IV. The Chinese are a most ancient people; they are the gray heads among the nations. Before England, before France, before Germany, before Greece, before Rome, before Babylon, before Israel went out of Egypt-before them all was China and the Chinese. Their family line can be traced back almost to the plain of Shinar. Their early history takes in "the chief things of the ancient mountains." Of ancient times the development of their national traits began. Their cult outages that of all the nations except two or three; their "antiquity is of ancient days." Of all the nations mentioned in ancient history and Holy Writ—and there were not less than seventy of them-only two survive to-day, and one of them is scattered among the nations, awaiting its resurrection call; China is the other. The earth has become the graveyard of the old-time nations. One after another has God said of them, "I will dig thy grave, for thou art vile." One after another have they been "brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit." Egypt is dead and buried, and Edom and Midian and Palestine; the worm is spread under them and the worms cover them. Media is dead and Persia is dead. Nineveh is dead-she is "become a pool of water." God has commanded concerning her "that no more of her name be sown." And Babylon-great Babylon also is dead; dead and buried twenty-five hundred years ago. Babylon the splendid―her pomp is brought down to the grave. Babylon the mighty-the hammer of the whole earth is cast out like an abominable branch. But China! China still lives; the land of Sinim is still there in the hands of the same people that held it when Isaiah wrote. China, the sole survivor as a nation, still walks the earth with more people sleeping below ground than any of the ancient nations ever had, and more peo