The Lutheran Pioneer St. Louis — 1925, Page 94

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94

THE LUTHERAN PIONEER.

work he was beginning in His name. One of the
first missionary vessels ever built, the Candace, in
1853, took the first foreign missionaries from this
institution to Natal, South Africa. A second group
of missionaries went to Western Transvaal a few
years later to open the work among the Bechuanas.
Just before his degth Harms opened a mission
among the Telugus of South India, and under the

- direction of his brother and successor, Theodore
Harms, the work was extended to Australia and
Persia. The World War greatly paralyzed the work
of Hermannsburg, as it did that of all other Ger-
man missionary societies. After the war the Her-
mannsburg mission territory in India was taken
over by the Lutheran Joint Synod of Ohio.

The Value of Trained Women as Mission-
Workers. — Other denominations have for years
seen the great value of trained woman-workers for
missions; but our own Synodical Conference has
been somewhat slow in showing a proper apprecia-
tion of this phase of Christian endeavor. While
other parts of the American Lutheran Church have
been using the services of consecrated trained
woman-workers, we have made but a beginning.
Here and there in our circles trained women have
been used with fine success in inner mission, city
mission, and foreign mission work. While in Bal-
timore a few years ago, we were pleased to hear
that one of our congregations in that city was em-
ploying a lady in the morning hours to do kinder-
garten work and in the afternoon for social service.
There may be other congregations that have done
the same, but the first congregation among us, as
far as our knowledge goes, which has the distinction
of employing .a full-time parish worker is Im-
manuel Congregation of New York City, Rev. Geo.
Schmidt, pastor. Miss Martha Eber, a graduate of
our Deaconess School at Fort Wayne, Ind., was re-
cently installed there as parish deaconess. May
many others of our large city congregations follow
the example of this congregation! Tor there can
be no doubt that a trained deaconess would prove
a great asset for most of our large city churches.

“Lepers Support a Foreign Missionary. — At
Kwangju, Korea, there is a leper colony. Some of
these lepers have means of their own and are self-
supporting. But by far the most of them are the
objects of charity or receive a cent or two a day for
the little work they are able to do. Now, these
lepers are providing the full support of a native
missionary helper on the island of Cheiju, which
“is more than four hundred miles off the mainland

of Korea. -

New York the Stupendous. — New York has
more people in its bounds than have all the six New
England States together. Within a distance of
twenty miles there are living 12,000,000 people, or
one-tenth of the total population of the United
States. The port of New York handles the most
valuable tonnage of any port in the world. In New
York City’s two universities and ten colleges there
are 50,000 students. Of the total population of
5,620,000, in 1920, the total “foreign white stock”
numbered 4,294,629 and was distributed in the fol-
lowing proportion, according to the leading mother
tongues spoken by them: Hebrew and Yiddish,
946,000; English and Celtic, 897,000; Italian,
803,000; German, 690,000; Russian, 221,000;
Polish, 161,000. The 14 per cent. of foreign-tongue
peoples not accounted for in the above totals speak
more than thirty different languages, some of these
foreign colonies being large enough to make respect-
able cities. There are 60,000 Swedes, 40,000 Nor-
wegians, 32,000 Spaniards, 26,000 Roumanians,
25,000 Greeks, 76,000 Magyars. The white for-
eign population of New York City is larger than
the combined population of Chicago, Detroit, and
Boston. There is one street, Jones St., only 445
feet long, but in walking through that street, you
will pass buildings that house 1,072 people, includ-
ing 522 children, representing ten nationalities.
You will hear these people talking Italian, Russian,
Polish, Greek, West Indian, Austrian, French,
Spanish, Irish, English. The American Bible So-
ciety, which furnishes the above figures, is distribut-
ing the Bible in fifty-three languages among these
millions of foreign-born inhabitants of New York
City.

African Languages. — There is one inestim-
able advantage from the tangle of African lan-
guages: it has worked to give the Bible a splendid
start. The British and Foreign Bible Society has
already published the Bible or parts of it in 164
African tongues. ‘Thus the youth of uncivilized
Africa is being taught through the Bible. It was
the teaching from the Bible after the Reformation
which formed our Anglo-Saxon character and which
still breathes in our literature. To understand
English prose and poetry, it became necessary for
Calcutta University, largely attended by Hindus, to
prescribe selections from the Bible as a text-book.

Sir Andrew Wingate.

Jewish Missions of the United Lutherans. —
Just recently several copies of the Hebrew Lu-
theran, a missionary monthly, issued by the Jewish
Committee of the United Lutheran Church of