PORTO RICAN HUT WITH MISS MELLANDER AND THREE MEMBERS OF CHURCH AT PALO SECO.
|The Darkness of South America.| In spite of the fact that its ten political divisions are republics, and that it has produced men of distinguished rank as scientists and scholars, South America is on the whole a land of dense ignorance, not only among the Indian population but among the mixed or pure descendants of the European settlers. In spiritual things the ignorance is tenfold increased. Of the hundreds of tribes of Indians, many have never heard the Gospel, and to only ten millions of the population has it been presented in any intelligible form. Rome, which has claimed South America for its own has done little to raise the natives from their degraded condition or to enlighten their darkness, and has opposed most bitterly the spread of the pure Gospel among them. The priests declare that the Protestant Bible is an immoral book which will do great harm to him who reads, and make every effort to destroy all the copies which they can find. Nor do they offer their own version. Doctor Robert Speer is reported to have said that visiting seventy of the largest cathedrals in South America, he could find but one Bible, and that a Protestant version, about to be burned. Of the religious condition, Doctor Warneck says, “The Catholicism is of a kind that, according to even Catholic testimonies, is more heathen than Christian. There are many crosses but no word of the Cross; many saints, but no followers of Christ.”
Against the domination of the Catholic Church the most intelligent of the population have rebelled and men especially have ceased to believe in the priests or their teaching. May they upon leaving the old find true guides into new and better things!
|The Population.| The latest statistics give the following as population of South America:
| Whites | 18,000,000 |
| Indians | 17,000,000 |
| Negroes | 6,000,000 |
| Mixed White and Indian | 30,000,000 |
| Mixed White and Negro | 8,000,000 |
| Mixed Negro and Indian | 700,000 |
| East Indian, Japanese and Chinese | 300,000 |
| ---------- | |
| A total of | 80,000,000 |
Since South America offers vast resources in a sparsely settled country, its population will unquestionably increase rapidly by immigration.
|The Roman Catholic Church in South America.| Recent activity on the part of the Protestants in the interest of the nominal Christians of South America has roused much opposition among Roman Catholics. Among Protestants themselves the question has been debated with an earnest desire to see the right and wrong of this problem. To this question Dr. Robert Speer has given the following reasons for his belief that such mission work is legitimate and necessary. (1) The moral condition of South America warrants and demands the presence of the force of evangelical religion in a country where from one-fourth to one-half of the births are illegitimate and where male chastity is unknown. (2) The Protestant missionary enterprise with its stimulus to education and its appeal to the rational nature of man is required by the intellectual needs of South America. (3) Protestant missions are justified in order to give the Bible to South America. (4) Protestant missions are justified by the character of the Roman Catholic priesthood. (5) The Roman Church has not given the people Christianity. It offers them a dead man, not a living Saviour. (6) The Catholic Church has steadily lost ground; the priests are reviled and derided; religion is abandoned by men to priests and women. (7) Protestant missions may inspire and compel self-cleansing in the South American Catholic Church. (8) Only the Protestant religion, free from superstition, reformed, Scriptural, apostolic, can meet the needs of South America.
The missionary occupation of South America has been small; indeed no country has so low a percentage of missionaries. It is said that in any of the ten countries a missionary could have a city and a dozen of towns for his parish. In some of the countries he could have one or two provinces without touching any other evangelical worker.
As Lutheran missionaries in the person of Ziegenbalg and Plütschau were the first to enter India; as Peter Heiling, a Lutheran, was the first to enter Africa, so the Lutheran missionary Justinian von Welz, of whose stirring appeal to the Church we have told in Chapter I, entered South America, where in Surinam he died in 1668. It gives us at least some small comfort to realize that of all the South American countries Surinam is to-day the most thoroughly evangelized, even though it is the Moravian and not the Lutheran Church which has done the work. After the time of Justinian von Welz we search in vain for Lutheran missions in South America for many years.
|German Lutherans in South America.| Among the emigrants to South America have been large numbers of Germans. For these the Church at home has cared so that there are many well-established Lutheran congregations. Here and there these congregations have undertaken a little missionary work among the natives, but there has been no organized effort for their evangelization as in the case of Africa and Asia.