The Lutheran Pioneer St. Louis — 1926, Page 94

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94

Is This Nothing to You? — Is it nothing to you
that one-third of Africa, a territory containing
50,000,000 people, is absolutely without mission-
stations? Is it nothing to you that, while we in
this country have one doctor to 744 persons, in
China there is only one doctor to 710,000 persons?
Is it nothing to you that out of ten persons in South
America eight are indifferent to all matters of
religion ?

In Many Tongues. — Preaching is done in New
York City in no less than twenty-five different
languages, in addition to English.

A Serious Puzzle. — The children in an African
mission-compound had a fox-terrier, with properly
cut tail, which was a source of much wonder to the
native boys and girls. Finally one little boy got up
enough courage to ask the question, “The tail of
the dog —was it bit off or drove in,’”—Do our
modern evolutionists make much better guesses?

Religious Parasites. — ‘The mendicant monks of
the Middle Ages were mostly parasites upon the
body of the visible Church. Just so India has to-
day over five millions of people who are religious
parasites; they live by begging—a dead weight
on India’s scanty resources. And yet these “holy
men,” not unlike the mendicant monks of yore,
offer little aid in meeting the realities of this life
and none in preparing for the life to come; they
cannot show the way out of darkness, for they are
blind themselves and know nothing of Christ, the
Light of the world.

Difficult to Express. — A Chinese Christian
family was the proud possessor of two pigs. The
older of the two was a runt, and the younger
had outgrown him. The husband and wife were
explaining the situation to the new missionary.
“The big pig, he the littlest,” explained the husband
in broken English. “No,” said the wife, “he means
not that. He means the young pig is the oldest.”
But do not men speak just as foolishly and con-
tradictory of religious things when they do not
cling to God’s Word?

oo

Manufactured Scripture.

This comes to us from Alabama: In one of the
State’s villages an unlettered colored man, having
“felt the call” and receiving license to preach, arose

to announce the text for his first sermon and said:

“Breddern and sistern, my tex to-night is perfecly

familiah to you all, so I don’t need to read it; but

THE LUTHERAN PIONEER.

if I should read it to you all, it would read thusly:
‘Train up a chile, an’ away he goes.’ ”

Having thus given his text, he proceeded with
the exposition: “Now, ain’t dat jes’ what we see
hap’nin’ roun’ about us ev’ry day? Ever since de
people sen’ de chilluns to school, dey is done startin’
to go away. Befo’ we sta’ted de fool t’ing of ed-
dicatin’ our chilluns, dey stayed heah in good ole
Alabama. If we wants de chilluns dat God gave:
us to stay heah, we’s got to quit trainin’ dem. You
heah? I say, dat am de God’s truf; for our tex
says so.”

Thus the preacher spent thirty or forty minutes
in “lambasting” the parents of the community for
disregarding the divine warning of the text and
exhorted them to turn from their evil ways if they
would have their children stay in Alabama.

We laugh at this poor, ignorant colored preacher
and say that such as he should not be permitted
publicly to expound Scripture with the sanction
of constituted church-bodies. And we are right in
our stricture. But, after all, let us remember that
this unlettered colored preacher is by no means
an isolated exception in human factories for the
production of “Scripture.” There are preachers
well able to read the Bible, not only in English,
but in its original tongues, who are guilty of am
equally great wrong. These educated counterfeiters:
do what this unlettered Negro preacher did in his:
ignorance, though without the excuse that he had.
He in his ignorance twisted God’s Word to suit
his whims and prejudices; but these misuse all the:
machinery of modern learning to give their counter-
feit of God’s Word the appearance of being genuine.

Let us remember what the Lord says, Jer.
23,31: “Behold, I am against the prophets, saith
the Lord, that use their tongues and say, He saith.”
God’s wrath rests upon all those who come as His
ambassadors and claim to have His message on
their lips and yet are speaking their own words
and not God’s at all. P. J. L.

Hampton-Tuskegee Fund.

“The $5,000,000 required to be raised or pledged
by December 31 in order to meet the conditions un-
der which George Eastman offered to add $2,000,000:
more as an endowment fund for these two institu-
tions was secured three days ahead of time,” says:
the Missionary Review of the World. “Che chair-
man of the Campaign Committee said: —