BY C. C. VINTON, M.D., SEOUL, KOREA Missionary of the Presbyterian Church (North) Fifteen years ago the Christian community in Korea was comprised of two congregations worshiping in the city of Seoul, and in connection with which were something more than sixty baptized believers. Services were possible only upon a foreign compound, baptism might be administered only in the face of prohibitions, itineration throughout the country was subject to many restrictions, persecution even to death was the expected lot of many who abandoned the ancient faith. To-day Korea has more than fifteen hundred worshiping congregations each Sabbath, many of them. housed in private dwellings and observing but elemental forms of worship, yet not a few meeting in church buildings and ministered to by missionaries or well-taught evangelists. Among them all hardly half a hundred have attained ecclesiastical organization according to prescribed denominational forms; five or six hundred others have received recognition from missionaries who have been able to visit them and appoint leaders over them, and the balance are of that large number of communities where the seed has fallen upon good ground and sprung up and brought forth plentifully, yet to which the guidance of trained instructors has not been extended. The origin of such communities comes about in very simple ways. A colporteur has passed with his load of books, selling, teaching, and explaining a villager has heard the Word preached in the capital, in a market town, or has received somewhere a leaflet; a sick man has sought medical help at dispensary or hospital and brings thence the medicine for the healing of a soul; a Christian peddler brings a few tracts with his wares and spends time in reading and explaining them to such as wil listen; a church-member working out. "preaching days" brings the glad message from a distance; a believing family remove here from some other region and hasten to let their light shine. Those interested soon draw others around them and a group is formed of such as meet on the Sabbath and read together and seek to understand the Scripture, to practise its rules, and SO call themselves Christians. According to their number they usually endeavor to erect a house of worship, they take up weekly collections for the support of religious institutions among them, perhaps they purchase and distribute tracts and leaflets among their neighbors. And this before their existence as a community of believers has come. to the knowledge of missionary or helper and while the hands of both are so tied by obligations of other work that in years' time no visit can be paid the region. The Gospel now is free in Korea. and its preaching unhindered. All restricting ordinances have been removed. The official world is indifferent, not hostile. Persecution is mainly a matter of the family and the neighborhood. The recent war has even turned a mighty tide of inquiry toward that which seems the only unchanging thing amid all that change. Men and women in the vil lages and in the cities, throughout all the peninsula, those of the lowest rank and those of the highest, even to the very palace itself, have been coming these latter months in such numbers as never before to ask seriously after the way of life. It is the astonishing fact, yet within the bounds, to say that in all Korea the new inquirers could not have been less than ten thousand in number for the summer months of 1905, and for the months of the autumn another ten thousand. The propagandism of the Korean Church is a true home missionary work. In perhaps all the larger and in many of the smaller congregations societies are organized for this end. They are in most cases the spontaneous growth of the people's own impulse. Frequently a group of churches are so affiliated as to cover the territory of a county or a province. Their officers are native leaders, their collections are systematically gathered and cared for, and they pay salary and expenses to some among themselves who are qualified to go out and tell of Christ's redemption in the villages before unreached. In the past two years Korean Christians have devised a new form of collection taken up in days of preaching time. Men and Women contribute. At one class of a few hundred attendants over thirteen hundred days were so pledged. One man gave thirty days and others gave a week's or two or three days' time, as they could spare. By the terms each one who contributes is to go a distance from home, to some wholly heathen locality, and to spend the full period of the designated time in preaching the Gospel to those who have never heard it. Without any other aid than that of passive encouragement from the missionary force, this movement has come to be one of mighty power among the churches, and already eight or ten thousand days have been pledged and most of them worked out faithfully. Some who learned the fact have assailed the policy of the missionary workers in Korea, saying they set a standard unscripturally high for those applying to enter the Church. But the fact and the standard are established by the native members of church consistories and in obedience to their own reading of the words of Christ. It has long been their practise, almost universally followed among them, to inquire of applicants for baptism: "Since your conversion what have you done for Christ? To whom have you made Him known?" And if the answer is a negative one, the counter reply is very ready: "You are not yet ready to be sealed to Christ. Go first and prove your faith by your works and come again." These congregations, smaller and greater whether partially organized or not, maintain a self-supporting attitude. Their collections are regularly taken and are often generously abundant. In many country places it is the custom for housewives, to whom actual money is something of a rarity, to begin upon the first day of the week setting aside, when the day's portion of rice is cooked, a spoonful for each member of the family, and this accumulation, sold upon Saturday or carried to the church, forms this household's contribution to the Lord's treasury. With these gatherings the people erect their church buildings, light them and heat them, keep on hand a supply of literature to be sold or handed out, pay their proportion of the salary of the helper assigned to their district, send their own leader up to the Bible class held for a few weeks at the station, maintain a primary school perhaps for their children or make a contribution toward the higher educational institutions in the chief centers, even support one of themselves for a few months of each year at the theological class in order that he may later become their pastor, and raise all the funds of the home missionary work. These people regard the prayermeeting of like consequence with the Sabbath service, and every Wednesday finds nearly the same faces gathered for a service of prayer and song. The Sabbath-school is a real Bible-school, not for the children only, but one of the regular services of the church, where all, old and young, gather for study together of a passage of the Word. In It is not to be thought that missionary work in Korea is without its. setbacks, its discouragements. There are many who put their hands to the plow and then turn back. many cases, because the inquirers are so overwhelmingly numerous, because time is so pressing and there are so many cares, so many already accepted whose instruction it were. perilous to remit, because distances are so great and so much else interferes with the going and shepherding, it has proved the history of promising groups that they fell into grave error, went wide of the true faith they were seeking. Surely the harvest is white and calling the reapers. But with these and various other discouragements, the progress of the work is ever upward with that steady impulse that gives continued hope. And it is borne up-it has been all these years-on a very great volume of prayer arising from Koreans and those that love Korea in all portions of the world. The prayer of the Korean Christian is often that of the closest dependence on his Maker, laying bare the faith of him who never doubts. Many times it puts to shame the foreign hearer. It was the testimony of one who had been teaching a ten days' class of church leaders in the North and had been enjoying the rare fellowship that comes in such a relation, that at Northfield conferences and other religious gatherings the uplift to his own spiritual life had never been so great as from the simple trust displayed by these men. The system that has grown up of instruction in Bible classes of different grades is perhaps the only one by which the influence of the individual missionary could be so widely extended over a broad parish. Once or more each year a class of helpers, colporteurs, and leaders of larger churches is held by the missionaries of each station, and a similar class by the ladies for Bible women and others. Two weeks or so are given to instruction in Scripture, in simple theology, and to conferences regarding Christian usages. Then these people separate to their own communities and repeat among them what they have been hearing. Besides this, classes are constantly being taught in the central churches of various districts, to which are gathered the prominent members of surrounding churches. The studies are not unlike those of the station classes, and the instructors, while sometimes including one or more missionaries, usually are chosen from among the helpers and qualified leaders. Taken in connection with the wide diffusion of literature, by which the teachings of an individual are extended to an ever broadening circle of hearers, this system of classes constitutes the best hope of the missionary force for molding the growing Church into an abiding Christianity. Literature, largely tracts and elementary expositions of Christian doctrine, has been supplied in reasonable abundance until recent years by the Korean Religious Tract Society. The great increase in enquir ers, combining with other causes of rapidly increasing demand, the absence of a corresponding increase in available funds, the preparation of a large number of manuscripts all directed to specific needs, and the great importance of a suitable supply of every class of religious and educational literature to a work like that progressing in Korea, all served to accentuate this as a time of crisis in this respect when the facts were canvassed last year; and the result has been the drawing yet nearer together of all interested and the formation of a Union Publishing House to which the Tract Society is a party and for which the needed funds are being solicited. Should this object be attained, it is thought well above one million volumes per year, in addition to large numbers of sheet tracts and of periodicals, will be the normal output to meet actual demands; and these all to be sold-for the Koreans are a reading people and abundantly willing to buy. One other resource from which much is hoped for the education and training of the Church is the instruction of a ministry. In two stations classes are being taught certain months of each year, and perhaps for both the Methodist and the Presbyterian connection the first graduates will be ordained in 1907. These will not be fully educated men, but they will be men trained as fully for leadership as existing circumstances allow, and they herald the time when the Church in Korea shall conserve all its forces and all its opportunities for Christ under the leadership of its own ministry. Whether the political future of Korea is likely to have a decided influence upon the development of this Church, one may well question but hardly answer. Changes wrought by the war were far less than might have been expected. The resultant opening of the hearts of so many to the Gospel is the most signal one. In the providence of God may it not be that Japanese rule is to open a still wider door of entrance and to render more stable the conditions under which that Church is to grow? And in that same providence may it not also be that by these very bonds a Church of so high a type is to have its influence in welding in closer unity, in raising to greater spirituality, the churches growing apace in neighboring empires? BY REV. HENRY L. E. LUERING, PH.D., STRAITS SETTLEMENT Great statesmen in recent years have often given their testimony to the value of missions when they have gone out of their way to attend some missionary function in the foreign field or when they have spoken at anniversaries and conferences of missionary societies in Christian lands. Still more valuable than such utterances are often the silent testimonies of those called to administer foreign colonies and dependencies. The Malay Peninsula is one of the most beautiful countries on the globe. It is developing marvelously in many respects and possesses the richest tin mines in the world. The governments have of late shown much interest in the development of agriculture, especially the culture of rice and the much more profitable planting of cocoanuts and rubber. The Chinese residents of Malaysia have proven expert business men and also promising objects of missionary endeavor. Every society at work in the field has found them responsive to the preaching of the Gospel. The success is marked, not only by the number, but also by the quality of the converts, and urges every mission to more devoted and widespread activity among these children of the Middle Kingdom. A few years ago, when traveling through a rather thinly populated district of the Sultanate of Perak in the company of a high government official, I happened to speak of news recently received of the failure of crops in a part of the Fukien Province in China and the consequent suffering of the people. We were surrounded by lux uriant forests of valuable timber which were of no particular use to anybody, and I suggested that it would be at great benefit to invite Chinese settlers to make this fertile country their home. Encouraged by the official I presented to the government of the State of Perak a plan for the establishment of a Chinese Christian colony, and after some modification this plan was accepted and approved by the Resident General of the Federated Malay States and sanctioned by the High Commissioner, the Governor of the Straits Settlements. The Methodist Episcopal Mission was asked to allow me to go to China in order to gather five hundred settlers for an agricultural colony in Perak. These people were to be the forerunners of five hundred more who should be invited to join the settlement a few years later. I selected 2,500 acres of valuable land with a reserve of the same size for distribution among the people, and the government agreed to bear all the expenses of the emigration, to defray the whole expenditure of roadmaking, to give sanitary and medical supervision and to advance to the settlers food and farm supplies for six months, or until the first harvest should have been gathered. These latter amounts were to be repaid in six yearly installments without interest. The total proposed expenditure to the government could not have been less than $60,000 (Mexican). In due time I went to the Kukien Province and collected mainly in the stations connected with the Methodist Episcopal missions around Hinghua, Hokchiang, Fuchau and Kucheng, the |
