|The Work of Deaconesses.| During the last twenty years the Rhenish Society has sent out deaconesses to take special charge of the work among women. They manage the girls’ schools, teach and give Bible lessons to married and unmarried women and try in every way to further the development of their own sex.
Not only have the Rhenish missionaries won a large harvest from among the Bataks, but they are winning also many converts from among the Mohammedans, a much more difficult task.
The effect of the Christian religion is described in a letter from a Rhenish missionary in Sumatra.
|A Land Transformed.| “What a difference between now and thirteen years ago! Then everything was unsafe; no one dared to go half an hour’s distance from his village; war, robbery, piracy and slavery reigned everywhere. Now there is a free, active Christian life, and churches full of attentive hearers. The faith of our young Christians is seen in their deeds. They have renounced idolatrous customs; they visit the sick, and pray with them; they go to their enemies and make conciliation with them. This has often made a powerful impression on the heathen, because they saw that the Christians could do what was impossible to heathen--they could forgive injuries. Many heathen have been so overcome by this conduct of the Christians that they came to us and said: ‘The Lord Jesus has conquered.’”
The failure of Mohammedanism to meet the deep need of the human soul is shown in another letter from a Rhenish missionary in the same field.
|In the Last Hour.| “Here I must make mention of the faithful Asenath, whom on the last day of the old year we committed to the bosom of the earth. After an illness patiently endured for two years she felt her end approaching. As the last provision for her way she wished yet once more to enjoy the Holy Supper. I administered it to her in her roomy house before a large assemblage. As I was about to give her the bread she said, ‘Let me first pray.’ And now the woman, who for weeks had not been able to sit upright, straightened herself up, and prayed for fully ten minutes, as if she would fain pray away every earthly care out of her heart. I have seldom heard a woman pray in such wise. Thereupon she received the sacred elements. The next day I found with her a Mohammedan chieftain, who on taking leave wished her health and long life. ‘What say you?’ she replied, ‘after that I have no further longing. My wish is now to go to heaven, to my Lord. Death has no longer any terrors for me.’ Astonished, the Mohammedan replied: ‘Such language is strange to us. We shrink and cower before death, and therefore use every means possible to recover and live long.’
|The Beams of a Living Hope.| “Even so I think of our James, whose only son died. When at the funeral I pressed his hand, with some words of comfort, he said: ‘Only do not suppose that I murmur and complain. All that God does to me, is good and wholesome for me. I shall hereafter find my son again in life eternal.’ So vanish little by little the comfortless wailings of heathenism; the beams of a living hope penetrate the pangs and the terrors of death, as the beams of the sun the clouds of the night. And, as the hopelessness of heathenism is disappearing, so is also its implacability. When Christians contend, and at the Communion I say to them: ‘Give each other your hands’, often they say: ‘Nature is against it; but how can I withstand the graciousness of my Saviour?’ Such words are not seldom heard. And am I not well entitled to hope, that they, as a great gift of my God, warrant a confident hope in the final and glorious victory of the Prince of Life, and of his great and righteous cause?”
|Nias.| On the Island of Nias and in some of the lesser islands, the Rhenish missionaries have been at work since 1865. Here there are about a quarter of a million inhabitants who are racially related to the Bataks. Persisting through many years with but a few baptisms, the missionaries were finally rewarded. There are now thirteen stations with eighteen thousand Christians. The number of inquiries is greatest in those portions of the island where heathenism is the least broken, and the whole island seems to be open to the Gospel.
The Rhenish missionaries have in all in Malaysia Christian communities whose total inhabitants number one hundred and sixty-five thousand, of whom seventy-five thousand are church members. It is a rule of the Rhenish society to exercise the greatest care in baptizing converts so that only those shall be accepted who are worthy and who understand the step which they are taking.
|Java.| The beautiful Island of Java to the Southeast of Sumatra has been called Holland’s treasure house. Though the island has been under Christian control for three centuries the results of mission work do not make a very large showing. The largest of the Protestant Christian societies at work is the German Neukirchen Mission which has eleven principal stations, with twenty-nine workers. Java is inhabited chiefly by Mohammedans who have here a university and who have issued the Koran in the Javanese language. These Mohammedans are more willing to listen to the Gospel teaching than those in many other parts of the world.