The Lutheran Pioneer St. Louis — 1926, Sheet 186

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THE LUTHERAN PIONEER.

in contact with the saving Word of God. Our
Greensboro college has proved itself a good mis-
sionary agency. Persons now in the employ of
‘our Negro Missions and other persons who have
become prominent in their community, acting as
a leaven, were gained for Christ and our Church
through Immanuel Lutheran College. Money in-
vested in this institution is well invested and
brings rich returns.

The Lord hath need of the gifts of His Chris-
tians for Immanuel Lutheran College at Greens-
boro: May they straightway send them!

The World’s Biggest Business.

Which is it? Standard Oil? United Steel?
No; bigger than any other business in the whole
wide world is the business of Christianizing its
people. Of course, it goes without saying that it
takes perseverance to carry on this great business
successfully. But what big business does not re-
quire that? Tlierl, of the Iowa Synod’s mission in
New Guinea, worked ten years before he gained the
first convert; William Duncan worked seven years
before he saw the first-fruits of his labors among
the Indians at Fort Simpson; it was ten years from
the time they began their work that the mission-
aries among the Bechuanas of Africa saw the first
rays of light; Beck worked for many years in
Greenland before Kayarnak became his first con-
vert; and it took fifteen years to gain the first
Zulu for Christ; Gilmour in Mongolia was even
compelled to work for twenty years before he could
report favorable results. At the end of fifty years’
hard labor, China had only fifty native Protestant
Christians.

But as He did in the first years of the Christian
era, so God now also rewards the perseverance of His
people. From the time that Carey began his labors
in India it took ninety years to gain the first million
converts. The second million was won in less than
twenty-five years. At the present time converts are
being added in the foreign field at the rate of a
million in twelve years. In India, China, Korea,
New Guinea, and other portions of the field thou-
sands upon thousands are being prepared for bap-
tism, and many other thousands are clamoring to
be instructed. Ah, yes, the Lord, in His boundless
mercy, is again and again repeating the -blessings
of the first Pentecost in the mission-fields of the
Church.

183

An army of nearly fifty thousand foreign mis-
sionaries is employed by Protestants and Catholics
at an annual cost of $100,000,000.

In the thousands of mission-schools almost
2,500,000 persons are being instructed under the
influence of Jesus’ Gospel. In the mission hospitals
and dispensaries more than ten million annually
are given treatments, and.the number of operations
in a year is almost 200,000.

But as big as this foreign mission business is, it
is not big enough. Though the figures I have just
now given are stupendous, the figures that show
what is not being done are still more stupendous.

The world is large, and there are many people
living in it. You and I have no real conception of
the millions inhabiting our earth, except by com-
parison. Take your Bible, count the number of
letters on a page; then multiply the result by the
number of pages, and you will approximately have
the number of letters in your Bible. But you would
have to multiply the number of letters by about one
hundred to get the number of people living in
China alone. Can you grasp it? In India there
are three times as many people as we have in the
United States. But in China, with its more than
400,000,000 people, there are only about one million
Christians, while among the 325,000,000 people of
India there are about two and one-half million
Christians. In spite of the great progress that mis-
sions have made in recent years, there are still
three times as many non-Christians as Christians.
Christ’s heritage is still far from being reclaimed.
Think of it! Where one man knows Christ, there
are three that live without knowing His love, suffer
without experiencing His comfort, and die without
the hope which His Gospel alone can bring to man.
In America we have a minjster for every few hun-
dred people; in China. there is one for 100,000

persons.

Bringing to men the Gospel of Jesus is without
a doubt the greatest business in the world. No one
can successfully deny this. But as long as we in
America continue to spend four times as much for
candy, twenty times as much for perfumes, cos-
metics, and jewelry and twenty-five times as much
for tobacco in all its forms as we do for foreign
missions, so long we are not giving the biggest
business in the world that support which it must
have and which God wants it to have. F.J.L.

“An atmosphere surcharged with prayer is
poison gas for the devil.”