# The Lutheran Pioneer_St. Louis_1920_S85 # Machine transcription, uncorrected — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration) 84 The Lutheran Pioneer. perate zone. Everything can be grown there pro- ducible in the United States and many other things besides. It has mineral resources that rival those of our country; its coal and iron ore deposits are seemingly inexhaustible. But China is in the bondage of heathen darkness and superstition. The hold superstition has upon the Chinese is almost incredible. It controls the practise of medicine and leads to the perpetuation of awful tortures. It prevents the growth and spread of knowledge and gives the most terrifying explanations of simple phenomena of nature, and leads the people to commit acts of unbelievable cruelty. Mission School in Hankow. China needs: Christianity, that is the only up- lifting power for its benighted millions. At present there are 5,000 missionaries at work in this large mass of people —about one to every 66,000 souls. * * * About one-fifth of the human race —or about 300,000,000 souls — dwells in the region between the Himalayas and the equator, and between the border of Persia and Siam. ‘This vast area contains 2,146,000 square miles (about three-fourths that of the United States), with 163 persons to the square mile as compared with 35 in our country. Here, in what is known as India, lives an ancient people that is very religious in the observance of the ordinances and customs of its heathen religion. A missionary one day saw a woman lying prostrate ~ on the ground; he saw her raise herself and put her ~ feet were her head had been, and prostrate herself once more, and so she went on. He asked her what she was doing, and she gave in answer one Indian word, which means, “A vision of it.” He knew that woman was going to travel miles and miles in this way to see what she thought a sacred flame coming from a mountain. Gross idolatry and superstition, and the iron-bound law of caste or class distinction —it is stated that there are-nearly two thousand castes of Hindus, and over eighteen hundred divi- sions in the Brahmin caste alone — are keeping this - people enslaved. The Christian religion again is the only force that can free the hearts and minds of this people from the ignorance and servitude of heathendom. * * * Japan, the so-called civilized country of Asia, is another field that calls for thousands of Christian workers. The people are literate and ftelligent. Ninety-eight per cent. of Japanese children are in national schools. Newspapers are plentiful. ‘Tokio is one of the world’s greatest student centers. ‘The products of Japan’s factories are marketed over the whole world. Though alive in a material way, the nation is spiritually dead. Buddhism and Shinto- ism, the latter the state religion of Japan, are heathen cults, strong in their opposition to Chris- tianity. Again, the Word of Him, who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, is the only vitalizing power that can raise the Japanese people out of the depths of depravity and immoral degeneration. es * * Africa has heen called “the dark, sobbing con- tinent.” Over its eleven million square miles, in which the areas of Europe, India, China, and Mexico could easily be engulfed, somewhere between 139 and 150 millions of ignorant, debased, and savage people are scattered. The forces of Islam, that is, the Mohammedan religion, are especially active to educate the natives to the worship of their God, and inculcate their re- ligious principles. Africa has been stirred indus- trially, politically, socially, and, to some extent, re- ligiously, by the World War.