(e) Medical Work.
This department of missionary effort has a wide sphere of usefulness. Though not so urgently necessary now as in former times in India, owing to the ubiquitous and efficient Government Medical Department, it is nevertheless popular and very useful. This is specially so when the whole work and its agency are brought into full subjection to the Christian, as distinct from the purely humanitarian, motive. No other department is more capable of being utilized as an evangelizing agency; and in many missions its influence is thus widely felt. Everywhere its aid to other departments of mission work is much appreciated through its ability to gain friends for our cause among those who would otherwise be inimical; and in preparing the hearts of many to receive spiritual help from the Great Physician. No fewer than forty hospitals, besides many dispensaries, are conducted by Protestant missions in India today. Many of the medical missionaries give their whole time to this work; others conduct the medical as only one of the [pg 256] departments of their missionary activity. To each method there are advantages and disadvantages; though, perhaps, the medical missionary finds greatest usefulness when he gives himself entirely to his profession as physician. But, in that case, he needs tenfold caution lest the distinctively missionary idea of his life-work should be subjected to, or lost in, the professional and the humanitarian spirit.
Medical work for women and children finds in India today perhaps its most urgent call. There is more need and suffering among them than among men.
(f) Work for Women.
From the first, missions have not neglected woman. She has been their care, and her conversion and elevation their ambition. But, in recent times, much has been added to this. Not only have separate and definite forms of work been opened for women; organized work by women in their behalf has suddenly taken high rank and attained considerable popularity among Christian peoples. Under Women's Missionary Societies fully 1,000 ladies have come to India and are giving themselves exclusively to work for their Indian sisters. All forms of effort are undertaken in their behalf. Assisted by an army of thousands of native Bible women, Zenana workers and mistresses, these ladies perform their noble service. Hindu homes are daily and everywhere visited, and the seed of Christian life and truth sown; thousands of non-Christian girls and young women are instructed and initiated into the mysteries of Bible truth and Christian life; and Christian womanhood [pg 257] is being developed, more rapidly indeed than Christian manhood, into a thing of strength and beauty. In the town of Madura alone thirty-one Bible women have access to 1,000 non-Christian homes where Bible instruction is gladly received. Another staff of twenty-one Christian workers instructs daily, in five schools, 500 Hindu and Mohammedan girls. Also a High and Training school for Christian girls, with 256 pupils; and a Bible woman's training school, with seventeen students, complete this organized work for women in that town. From it, as a centre, seventeen other women visit and work in seventy-two different villages and instruct 1,005 pupils. No work at present is more important or finds more encouragement than this organized activity for women.
A Junior Christian Endeavor Society.
A Village Christian School.