If in a generation we could send back to China a score of Yung Wings we should do more for the conversion of China than by any other method open to us.
The Report speaks of a plan for establishing a new mission in Southern China as being under consideration. To your Committee it would seem the part of wisdom to move slowly in this matter so long as the present facilities are offered for labor in this country, especially as it is uncertain how long these facilities may continue to be enjoyed.
Thirty different Mission Boards are already occupying points in China, and though their 1200 laborers are wholly inadequate for the work of evangelizing China, yet they furnish in their various stations, points from which laborers may go out, so that the call would seem to be for men to recruit the missions already established, rather than for forming new ones. Especially will a separate movement of this kind be unnecessary if the converted Chinese of this country are able to carry out their purpose of establishing a mission of their own in the country back of Canton. The very fact that they are entertaining such an idea, and earnestly pressing it, speaks volumes for the work which this Society has already accomplished, and opens a glorious vista for its ever expanding career in the future.
Your Committee would propose the following resolution:
Resolved, That in view of the small demands made upon the treasury of the A. M. A. by the work among the Chinese, and the great returns which that work promises, the constituency of this Society are under the most solemn obligations to furnish for this branch of its work all the means that can be employed consistently with a wise economy and with due regard for the encouragement of self-help by the converted Chinese themselves.—Rev. A. E. P. Perkins, Chairman.
THE CHINESE TO EVANGELIZE CHINA.
BY REV. C. H. POPE
Great good has been done in China by missionaries, but against what odds! Now in the free United States, the country whose government has been his nation’s most generous friend, and whose people have shown him most personal attention, the Chinaman can examine Christians with a criticism no less keen, but far surer to be correct. He has had no difficulty in seeing the difference between a “hoodlum” and a Sunday-school teacher. He has even been able to distinguish one reverend from another, and neither trusted “brother” Kalloch nor distrusted “brother” Pond. The international lesson he here learns as he could not at his home—that a line between the children of light and the children of darkness runs through many families, through all communities.