gladly, and, above the compassion on his face, his eyes smile. Then there is, among these recent converts, a sort of dependence upon God in the common affairs of life. Often the secret of this puzzles the more 66 emancipated missionary-as when one of my class, who is a wife and mother, came to me to tell me that she must return to her town, where we have a university extension in charge of a native teacher. "You will go to school in your own town?" I asked. "And do I know?" said she. That will be a thing for God to show me." Somewhere during her twenty-seven mile walk it was made plain to her that she should go to school, for there she sits to-day on a log before a chart, learning her letters by the express will of God. It would seem to me that Christ manifests himself very personally to the African Christian. In talking to one and another I have had an impression that he descerns the Lord where I do not. Walking in the green forest and talking as we walked by the way, I have felt my heart burn within me at some hint from a brown woman of her perception of Christ as a living Master and Friend. The Other Side This, says the committee on appraisement, is the right side of the African soul spread out in the best light, with a missionary pointing out the beauty of the design-like a fond curator in a museum. You would think that the African soul was a choice bit of inspired medieval art, a sort of jubilant Fra Angelico. Let us see the wrong side, suggests the committee. I reply: You will find many to show it to you-and glad of the job. The people of this country have a tale of three brothers whose father, being dead, paid them a visit one. night, and instructed them to go to a certain hilltop. With the coming of morning they went; they found an open space, where they sat down. Suddenly from above three great burdens, such as carriers bear in this country, fell to the ground, and each man took up his burden and walked away. The eldest became wearied when he had gone no great distance, and said: "Why should I die of this weight, and not even know what is in the load? So he untied the pack and found within great riches: women, and elephants' tusks, and cattle-but they all ran away. Presently along the path came the next brother, staggering under his burden. Said the eldest: "Why should you die of the weight of your load? I opened mine, and found nothing but stones." The brother believed the report and opened his burden, when away ran the goods, and nothing remained behind. He reproached his brother, but together they agreed to deceive the youngest. He soon came up with his bruden, and they advised him to open it, but he refused. "Rather," said he, "I will die. from the weight of it." So he carried it home, dropped it on the floor of his own hut, and shut to the door. Then he opened the bundle, and cattle and elephants' tusks and women filled the house. Thus the youngest became a headman, and very wise. Like that youngest brother, tho not a headman nor very wise, in the first tremble of my wonder I call to you my townspeople from a crack in the bark of my hut: "Come and seethe house is full of souls!" THE MISSIONARY EDUCATION OF THE YOUNG. I BY THE REV. WILLIAM BYRON FORBUSHI, PH.D. Junior Pastor of the Madison Avenue Reformed Church, New York; Author of the "Boy Problem" and the " Boys' Life of Christ" The Importance of Missionary Education The study of missions is an essential part of the education, especially the religious education, of the young. In these papers we shall suggest how it may be taught in the various departments of church life. Tho most earnest Christians believe in the importance of missionary knowledge for both young and old, they seldom realize the immediate and pressing need of emphasis upon it as a part of all Christian education. This study of missions is important, first of all, for the sake of the cause of missions. There is in all quarters colossal ignorance upon the subject. The opportunity for the missionary enterprise in all lands was never so great as it is to-day. The eagerness of young volunteers to take up the work is gratifying. But the means of forming and maintaining the connecting chain of interest between the enlisted volunteer and the home church are no longer adequate. The anniversaries of the boards are no longer the great event of the year in the churches. The young people have great religious conventions, at which missions are exalted, but they do not gather in large numbers at denominational meetings, either missionary or ecclesiastical. The missionary societies have dropped a little out of sight in most of the churches. No longer are diplomas certifying membership in the mission boards framed and displayed in homes as patents of Christian nobility. The secretaries are solicitors rather than ambassadors. Plat form meetings, presided over by eminent men and gathered to help Booker T. Washington or General Howard's college, are held in the great churches Sunday evenings in place of meetings in the interest of the work to which those churches are pledged. The missionary societies in the local churches are somewhat decadent. The Woman's Club is superseding the Ladies' Missionary Society, and Christian Endeavor has taken the place of the Mission Band. The "missionary concert" has become so obsolete that many people think it was a musical affair. Missionary magazines must stand upon their own merits, not upon the merits of the cause which they represent. The denominational monthly, devoted to the annals of the work in special fields, is not generally popular to-day. The characteristic reading of the intelligent Christian now is that which contains a broader view of human life and philanthropy, and therefore gives a more intelligent view of missions. There are almost no periodicals furnishing children with orderly, adequate, and interesting missionary information. Even the Sunday-school story-paper is usually barren in this direction. Missionary literature in general, books as well as periodicals, is for those already interested. There is little which, by its own intrinsic skill and interest in telling, can hold the attention of one who does not care for the cause. In nearly all that is published the educational idea is lacking. Even the recent text-books of the Young People's Movement have required supplemental pamphlets to adapt them for class use. Much, however, needs only a little additional working over to be of excellent educational service. The absence of the educational ideal is accounted for by the fact that reliance in the. past has been made upon what in various forms may be defined as "the appeal." The sermon of the pastor, the addresses of the secretary or returned missionary, the observing of special days-these are some of the usual appeals. In recent days "jubilees," "twentieth century funds,", two-cents-a-day savings, and other ingenious devices have been pressed to the limit of patience. With all these, there is a comparative decline in missionary giving. apex of per capita gifts was reached a dozen years ago, and has not been attained since. * The In the meantime a great missionary generation has been passing. The last of those who remembered the opening days of the American missionary societies are gone. The good people who were brought up on the Missionary Herald, and who loved it as they loved the other treasures of their youth, have fallen asleep. Those who responded to the old appeals are going, and the old appeals do not reach the men of to-day. One reason why the old method was not educational was because the old appeals did not require educational methods. One of those appeals was the fear of the doom of the heathen world. That did not demand educational methods. It did not require a wide information. One illus This is only true in some of the denominations.-EDITORS. ང་ tration of heathen wretchedness was as good as another to prove that the heathen were lost. To-day any one, irrespective of his own ideas on the subject, would acknowledge that the pictures of the eternal punishment of the heathen are not the preeminent appeal for missions. Men to-day believe that the heathen are lost, but they emphasize the present rather than the future loss, and to show that a refined Japanese or a polite Hindu is lost in a sense that calls for our pity and prayer now demands a discriminating and thorough course of teaching an educational method. The Present Day Appeals Never was Christian philanthropy more plentiful than to-day. And never did philanthropy call more for personal knowledge and service. If Missions is to stand among the philanthropies or above all philanthropy, it must make its worth known in a way to appeal to knowledge, feeling, and action, as philanthropy is doing. Just now it is the physical and mental needs of men that seem to arouse the quickest sympathy. The social settlement and the library movement are typical modern philanthropies. Missions must prove that needs that reach further into the heart of man, further back into human history, further forward into human hope, are still greater. Because the world of to-day does not know these things we need missionary education. Then the present age boasts that it is practical. That is why it thinks physical and mental needs are all. It is patriotic rather than universal. It is rich, and hence unable, with penniless Peter, to say to the needy: What the Church Needs But missionary education is important also for the sake of the Church and the Christian. We have long uttered such truisms as these: The real Christian is a missionary Christion; the business of the Church is missions; the coming of the Kingdom means the progressive reign of Jesus over all peoples. If these things are so, the future vitality of the Church and of Christian character depends upon the perpetuity of the missionary enthusiasm. Just now this is endangered. More than that, unless the danger is met by a providing foresight, the future of the Church is never safe. Missions present a permanent problem. Our question is not how to get money for to-day, how to keep up the year-book statistics, but how to train a missionary Church for the never-ending campaign. Behind the Church stands the Christian. Of him too the vital question is not, How much does he give? but, Why does he care? Are the motives that cause him to give to-day so deeply rooted in intelligence, principles, and volitions that we may be sure he will always want to give? If we are sure of that, we are sure of missions for all time. And the only way to be sure of the individual Christian is to educate him in missions. Then we need missionary education for the sake of childhood. Have you realized the culture-value of missions in the religious education of a child? The child is in many ways contemporaneous with the heathen. He feels with them, and understands them better than any adult can. Through the knowledge of the savage soul he may learn to understand his own. Missions have a profound effect upon the child interest. The difficulty of Bible teaching to-day is that the Bible seems trite. It is halfknown, and hence the conceited child assumes that it is fully known. The difficulty of Sunday-school methods is that they are traditionally limited in variety. Missions are not a substitute for, they are an extension of, the Bible. "I never knew the Bible until I knew Judson," said one. The Bible is chiefly a book of biography, and missions are an extension of Bible biography. They are the continuation of the book of Acts. They are the second volume of the Book of Life. Missions have also a deep influence upon the mind and soul of the child. The life develops by periods. There is the feeling period, when physical needs appeal to his sympathy. There is the adventure period, when the child becomes an explorer of his world. For this age the study of the customs of other peoples is most educative. This leads to the geography period, when he more definitely plots out his world. Here he begins to learn of the extent of other lands. Then comes the history period, when he passes from the geocentric to the Copernican realization and ceases to think the universe revolves around himself. Then the history of other peoples, and especially the missionary history, which is often the heart of history, becomes important. The child deserves to receive more than pathetic stories and mite-boxes. If mythology, the study of dead religions, has value in high-school teaching, how much more does the study of the living religions of men, which are the deepest expressions of their nature, mean in education! There is also the effect upon the will. The greatest religious need of a child is something to do. To keep him from introspection that weakens, or self-consciousness that makes his religious life unreal, he must be allowed little opportunity to talk about his religious life, and much opportunity to help serve and save others. Of course, we must make him see that his chief religious duties are at home; but he craves a crusade, he wants something to serve larger than the domestic circle. In the years of ideal he has a right to and a need to be allied even to the great world enterprises. What can be more enlarging to the life of a child than an affiance to the conquest of the world for Christ! Many endeavors to educate the child's religious nature in the Church are belittling to religion. They are in the nature of busy work. Missions call out the heroic and the self sacrificing. It is also, we may add, about the only task in which adults and children can work naturally and freely side by side. That other problem, of making the Church of the future a missionary Church, is most directly solved by educating the children. Finally, missionary education is important for the sake of the leadership of the Kingdom. Upon the leaders depend the ideals of the multitude. The question as to which are more important to the Church, its leaders or its children, is as unsolvable and is of precisely the same sort as the inquiry whether the egg is the parent of the hen or the hen of the egg. Both are important. By the leaders we mean not the ministry only, but the educated laity. Not only the sermons on missions, but the teaching of missions is to be the function of the leaders. Happily this strategic point, alone among the rest, has been seen and partly taken. Mission study courses in our colleges and seminaries are doing much to guarantee that the Christian men and women of all our colleges shall hold the missionary ideal. But this is only part of our work, tho it may be the first duty. The teacher may fitly come first before the text-book and the classroom. But now we must have a program of missionary education that shall apply to all the classrooms of religious education, the home, the Church and all its organizations and branches, and that shall provide, if not text-books, yet adequate methods of education in missions for all the people. Some Books on the General Subject "The Pastor and Modern Missions." By John R. Mott. Student Vounteer Movement, New York. "Young People and Missions." Foreign Missions Library, New York. "Proceedings of the Annual Conference of Foreign Mission Boards." Foreign Missions Library, New York. |