The Lutheran Pioneer St. Louis — 1930, Page 14

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14

THE LUTHERAN PIONEER.

“The Mediator.” — The Mediator is an English
Lutheran bimonthly periodical published for Jewish
readers. From a very humble beginning it has
grown to have a list of 12,000 readers.

A Dead Church Wants No Money. — You will
not have to wait long before an opportunity comes
to you of making effective use of this little tale, told
by Bishop Nelson in New Zealand: “Two men met
recently, and one asked a subscription from the
other for his church. The reply was an irritated
refusal, with the remark that the Church was always
wanting money. The other man received the refusal
and the criticism meekly and then said quietly:
‘When my lad was a boy, he was very costly. He was
always wanting boots and shoes and stockings and
clothes. He was always wearing them out, fast as
boys will wear things out, and the older and bigger
and stronger he grew, the more money had to be
. spent on him. I was always having to put my hand
in my pocket to find money to keep him going; but
he died, and now he doesn’t cost me a shilling.’ ”
“Yes,” said the bishop after telling his tale, “a live
church always wants money.”—Lutheran Standard.

Famine in China.— The Australian Christian
World reports the following on the awful conditions
obtaining in China in consequence of drought
and war :—

“The investigators of the China International
Famine Relief Commission report that since spring
the relief measures taken have considerably reduced
the area affected by famine, but there are still
35,000,000 people suffering. _

“Jn Central Kansu (Northwestern China) there
has been no rain for four years. The wheat-
growing area is like a desert, and in one city the
population has been reduced from 60,000 to 3,000.

“The investigators say that there has un-
questionably been much cannibalism there. One
magistrate sought to punish those who were dis-
covered eating corpses of famine victims, but the
cannibals pointed out that they were only eating
what the dogs ate. Typhus has taken a heavy toll.
Of twenty who were infected only eleven recovered.”

The paper adds: —

“We in Australia have deserved such chastise-
ment from the hand of God fully as much as the
people of China. It is of the Lord’s mercy that we
are not consumed. The eighteen on whom the tower
at Siloam fell and slew them were not sinners above
all that dwelt at Jerusalem. ‘Except ye repent; ye
shall all likewise perish” Luke 13, 4.”

A Flourishing Lutheran Foreign
Mission.

During the World War the German mission-
societies were compelled to abandon most of their
mission-fields or ask American Lutheran church-
bodies to take them over. Thus the German Neuen-
dettelsau and the Barmen Mission societies were
robbed of their mission in New Guinea. After the
war this mission was transferred to the Iowa Synod
of America and the United Evangelical Lutheran
Church of Australia, and the German missionaries,
whom the Australian Government had decided to
deport, were even permitted to remain in the terri-
tory of New Guinea.

In his recent book A Missionary Synod with
a Mission, a memoir for the seventy-fifth anniver-
sary of the Iowa Synod, Prof. G. J. Zeilinger gives
the following interesting account of his synod’s ex-
tensive Papuan Mission enterprise : —

“Our Mission is located in the northeastern part
of the island of New Guinea, next to Greenland the
largest island in the world. . This island, separated
from Australia by the Torres Straits, extends from
the equator in a southeasterly direction for some
1,800 miles to about the tenth degree of latitude.
It is larger by 48,000 square miles than the largest
State of the Union, Texas.

“New Guinea appears to have been first sighted
by voyagers in the early years of the sixteenth cen-
tury. A Portuguese navigator gave it the name
Papua, which in Malay signifies “frizzy-head,’ be-
cause of the frizzy hair of the natives. At a later
time it was called the Golden Island, presumably
because it was considered a sort of El Dorado. It
was named New Guinea by a Spanish voyager, who
thought the natives resembled those of the Guinea
coast in West Africa.

_ “In 1848 the Dutch took possession of the
western half of the island. In 1883 Queensland
annexed the part of New Guinea opposite its shores,
but England did not approve of this act. In 1884,
however, it was proclaimed a British protectorate,
while the northeast was annexed by Germany. The

. following year these two powers agreed to fix their

boundaries. As a result of the World War, German
New Guinea, with its group of large islands, was
assigned to the Australian Commonwealth adminis-
tration as mandatory under the League of Nations.

“The racial origin of the natives of New Guinea
will perhaps never be ascertained to any degree of
certainty. Possibly, as in other countries, the

aborigines have been driven inland and are now