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With this in view, I take pleasure in citing a few of the great benefits resulting from the works of Christian missions in modern times.

In China, Japan, India—in fact, in all parts of Asia, Africa, the two Americas, and in Oceanica, we find their churches and schools. Following closely in the footsteps of adventurous missionaries, we see that boon to mankind, the printing press. Used not alone in the translation of the Bible and religious works, but, as in Shanghai, where ten presses are in almost constant use, we find them printing works on science, medicine, law, history, agriculture, school books, etc., and scattering them broadcast throughout the land. Thousands of volumes, on one hundred and fifty different subjects, are printed and circulated among the people. And all this but a tithe of the work accomplished among the pagans of other countries. Christian missionaries have translated the Bible, school books, and hundreds of other instructive, useful works, into over two hundred languages and dialects.

Many of them, in addition to their sacredotal acquirements, are educated physicians as well. At the principal stations of the mission world, medical dispensaries are to be found, whose drugs, skillfully used, present an effective barrier to the spread of epidemical diseases. Of late days it has become customary to educate the women of the societies in medicine, to whose ministering cares thousands of pagans owe a healthful existence.

In one district in Africa, between Sierra Leone and Gaboon, a distance of nearly 2,000 miles, twelve Protestant societies have established missions. They have something over 20,000 children being educated in their schools, and many more adults, as members of

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Christian churches. trade has altogether disappeared, where in former times it counted its victims at the rate of 20,000 a year.

Under this influence the slave

Among the 5,000,000 inhabiting the island of Madagascar, 500,000 are members of Christian churches.

Among the islands of the Pacific, particularly those of Polynesia, Melanesia and Micronesia, the advancement and benefits are fully as marked. Some sixty or seventy years ago, sunk in the degrading depths of paganism, a great many of them cannibals, now number over 500 islands under the care of the missions.

Over twenty of their languages have been reduced to writing. Churches and schools adorn the land; the sound of the axe, saw and hammer, with the busy hum of manufactures, replace grim war and the hideous rites and yells of the man-eater.

In these islands it has been truly said that hundreds of native teachers and missionaries, who have themselves attended the feasts and joined in the revolting rites of the cannibals, may now be found successfully pointing the way, among their heathen brethren. The 200 churches and 1,400 schools in the Fiji Islands, the traditional home of the man-eater, will equally serve "to point a moral or adorn a tale" of missionary work.

Catholic and Protestant alike, are establishing religious stations in all parts of the pagan world, and with a friendly rivalry, that but adds strength and effectiveness to their efforts.

Many of the obstacles to be overcome by the missionary, particularly among the islands of the South Sea, are not the fierce intractable disposition of the

natives, but the barriers placed in the way by a low class of people, already referred to in this work. Beach-combers, wreckers and buccaneers, castaways from our civilization, have had more to do with the modern introduction of disease and degradation among the natives, than inherited paganism. The man who first taught them how to turn a pleasant, healthful drink, the sap of the cocoanut palm, into arrack, a vile brain-entangling rum, has introduced a degrading element more to be dreaded than pagan superstition.

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