The Lutheran Pioneer St. Louis — 1926, Page 36

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“THE LUTHERAN PIONEER.

35

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altars of the churches, and by this device both divin-
ities are simultaneously worshiped. When kneeling
before St. Michael, they light two tapers, one for
the dragon, the other for the archangel. An old
heathen deity corresponds to each personage of the
Christian religion, the sun to the Father, the moon
to the Madonna, the stars to the tutelar saints.”

The educated and ruling classes have largely
lost faith in all religion, and in one republic some
years ago they had set up the heathen goddess
Minerva as a patron saint, and a public festival was
annually observed in her honor.

The Missionary Forces.

Among the Indians of Central America the Cen-
tral American Mission has 28 foreign missionaries,
including wives, 70 churches, and 1,100 members.

existence to the United States, there was only one
missionary preaching the simple Gospel of Jesus
Christ, in 1920, to 350,000 Spanish-speaking Pana-
manians.

“In Central America there are found at least
one hundred towns, with a population of from eight
thousand to a hundred thousand souls, still to be
occupied, as indeed there are a thousand and more
villages where the Gospel has never been proclaimed,
and this, too, next door to a British colony and only
three days’ sailing from New Orleans.... One can
easily find countries in other directions that have as
large and even larger populations, quite as needy
and perhaps more neglected, but we do not find any-
where a field at once so easily reached and so freely
open to missionaries, so fruitful, and so inviting as
Central America.”

Mission-Station of Moravians at Bluefield on the Mosquito Coast, Central America.

This mission has visited all the tribes and is aiming
at placing at least two missionaries with each tribe,
which would require twenty additional laborers. The
Moravians are doing some good work among the
Mosquito Indians of Nicaragua. They have over
thirty laborers, including wives, in this field, and
over 1,200 communicants. Their work is being car-
ried on at fourteen stations, and the whole tribe
has been practically Christianized. Besides the work
among the Indians almost nothing is done to spread
the Gospel in Central America. In five of the re-
publics of Central America, Nicaragua, Salvador,
Costa Rica, Honduras, and Guatemala, there were
only ten evangelical church-buildings for the white
and mixed inhabitants in 1920. American Prot-
estant missions supported four schools and one hos-
pital in all of Central America at the time men-
tioned. In little Panama, which owes its very

Here is what Frederic Palmer has to say of
Central America’s spiritual needs: “In Guatemala,
Honduras, and Nicaragua the priesthood has fallen
into the lowest state of any countries in Christendom
not in the Caribbean region. It has neither political
power nor religious power of any account. If you
are looking for real church ruins, go to Central
America. Many churches are disused, and those
that are not are almost invariably in disrepair. The
people, poverty-stricken and hopeless, take little in-
terest in them. Religious ideas are dying and with
them moral ideas. A settled indifference of day-to-
day existence characterizes the masses, who are re-
yerting to Indian superstition. Whatever support
there is for religion comes from women of the better
class.” F. J. L.

“Your love has a broken wing if it cannot*fly
across the sea.”