Is this artificial language to come into real use? Professor Borgerhoff shows us that it is at least spreading rapidly. In June, 1905, there was only a handful of Esperantists in America. One year later there were fifty clubs, mostly in colleges. Paris offers about twenty free public courses. All over Europe the language has hundreds of thousands of adherents. Three thousand Esperantists, representing fifteen different countries, attended the congress at Boulogne-sur-Mer, in August, 1905.
THE CASH COST OF CONVERTING A SOUL.
Mormons Figure That It Amounts to $1,500, While Volunteers of America Find That $5 Will Do.
The Mormons appear to spend more money to secure a single convert than any other sect. Elder Ellsworth, of the Chicago Mormon Mission, told the Chicago Inter-Ocean that his church expended probably fifteen hundred dollars for each convert. The statement came out in connection with the Inter-Ocean’s inquiry into the cash cost of saving souls in Chicago. The Mormon figures were highest; the figures of the Volunteers of America—five dollars a convert—were lowest. It is patent that the average cost of conversion is much higher to-day than it used to be.
The Rev. George Soltau, a well-known evangelist, at work in Chicago, said to the Inter-Ocean’s representative:
Twenty-two years ago the cost of soul-saving was infinitesimal. A picture of heaven, a few passages from the Scripture, a prayer, and a request were sufficient—a few cents, in fact, and our task was accomplished. To-day people have no leisure. They have no time to listen to what preachers have to say. They read cheap literature, which, as a rule, is antagonistic to evangelization.
Present Facts in a Commercial Way.
Religious phraseology doesn’t work. We have to present our facts in a commercial way. We don’t relish it, but we have to move with the times. We content ourselves with the fact that, after all, true religion is transacting business with God and with heaven.
General education has made it much more difficult to convert the people and to conduct a campaign of evangelization. The people are provided with so many methods of occupying their time and thought that there is no longer any possibility of getting individuals to come to a church to fill in a spare hour as they used to do so readily.
This fact has been demonstrated to me again and again, and forced home when I find myself in places where I used to hold meetings with five or six hundred people in attendance and where now I find difficulty in getting together an audience of twenty or thirty people.