The Lutheran Pioneer St. Louis — 1925, Page 68

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68 THE LUTHERAN PIONEER.

the problem of caste among the living to contend
with; in China the greatest difficulty of the Church
is the worship of the spirits of the dead, which
holds them in spiritual bondage.

Mission-Station at Kyelang, Mongolia.

Besides the three religions mentioned reference
must also be made to Mohammedanism, which has
about ten million Chinese followers, and Animism,
the worship of evil spirits, found among the ab-
original tribes.

All these religions are, of course, utterly unable
to meet China’s spiritual need; in fact, they keep
the people in the power of Satan. On the other
hand, Christianity has also in China proved to be
the power of God unto salvation.

Christian Missions in China,

The first missionaries who came to China were
Nestorians. They entered in 635 A. D. and despite
much opposition succeeded in holding their own

for a number of centuries. In A. D. 1000 they
_ gained a whole Mongolian tribe, the Keraites,
_ whose chief bore the title Unk-Chan. It was the

conversion of this large tribe of Mongolians which
gave rise to the legend of the mighty Asiatic Chris-
tian empire of Prester John, so prevalent at the
time of the Crusades. In 1300 the Roman Cath-
olics entered the country. They now claim no less
than 2,000,000 adherents, but many of these are
virtually still non-Christians, since their creed is
a strange mixture of Christianity and Buddhistic
superstition. The Russian Orthodox missionaries
entered the field in 1716 and claim a communicant
membership of only 5,587.

Protestant missions in China began with the
coming of Robert Morrison to the southern coast of
China in 1807. He had been sent out by the Lon-
don Missionary Society, but came to America to
take ship for China, because the East India Com-
pany objected to carrying missionaries on their
vessels. At the time of Morrison’s arrival, Canton
was the only place in China where foreigners were
permitted to reside, and the rest of the vast empire
was hermetically sealed against foreigners. Dr.
Morrison gave all the energies of his first years in
China to the study of the language. He published
the New Testament in 1814 and the entire Bible

“Suffer the Little Children to Come unto Me.”

four years later. In 1823 the last of the six
volumes of his dictionary left the press. He bap;
tized his first convert in 1814, and when he died
in 1834, after twenty-seven years of toil, there were
only three members for the church that was or-