are thoroughly conversant with classic Greek literature, but many of them are woefully ignorant as regards the condition of the Greeks to-day.

The Greeks are the most important and the most interesting people of the Eastern Mediterranean. Besides occupying Greece itself, they are found in all the seacoast regions of Macedonia, and Asia Minor, and of Syria and Egypt; and their language is the common medium of communication in all that seacoast region.

The Greek people are profoundly attached to their Church; not that it provides for their spiritual needs, but because of its wonderful, continuous and rich record from the days of the Apostles down to the present time. But individuals here and there have for some time past realized the need of a deeper and more scriptural spirituality; and it has been the effort of American missionaries to bring such to a knowledge of evangelical truth. A weekly newspaper was started by a man who, himself, was a Greek, although sent out from America as a missionary, and for twenty-five years that standard of the truth was floating from Athens; but, alas, it had to be discontinued because of the failure of financial support.

There are now churches and communities of individuals scattered all through Greece and Turkey, who hold to spiritual truth. In the region of Athens there is a group of churches united in a synod. Just across the gean, in the region of Smyrna, there is another group of churches, and they co-operate with each other under the name of the "Greek Evangelical Union." Connected with this union there is one church far out on the Black Sea coast, at Ordu, near Trebizond, a noble, strong, evangelical church, standing virtually alone.

In Constantinople, at three or four different places, Gospel truth is proclaimed from Sabbath to Sabbath in the Greek language with fair attendance. All along the Black Sea coast the people are studying the Scriptures, and trying to worship God and live according to the requirements of the Scriptures.

In Marsovan, we have a Theological Seminary. Of the last two classes the majority of the members were Greeks, who are to-day preaching the Gospel to their Greek brethren.

The Greek clergy are ignorant, and opposed to every moral and spiritual uplift. But we see that the gospel has gone forth among the Greek laity, and there are promises of fruit, great in quantity and glorious in quality.

Social Influence of Missions in Turkey

Reports

REV. LEWIS T. REED, Cummington, Mass.* What is the social influence of missions in Turkey? say that in Turkey are 225 missionaries from the two greater societies, Congregational and Presbyterian; 155 organized churches, an annual expenditure of $225,000, a Protestant community of 60,000 souls; five colleges, six theological seminaries, over 600 other schools. What do these statistics mean for the life of the country?

The home is the greatest specific gift of missions to Turkey. The * Madison Avenue Reformed Church, April 23.

perfect flower of Anglo-Saxon civilization is the Christian home, wherein reign equality of love and service on the part of equally educated and equally responsible parents. The personal example of missionaries as well as education through our schools and publications have made the American home real in Turkey. Villages that, before the advent of the missionary, knew only houses of mud and thatch, where human beings and cattle herded together indiscriminately, have been transformed. The home has been created where one man dwells with one woman in a house where light, and order, and cleanliness reign.

By the side of the home as a social gift, I would place the school system. It has touched the thought of men and women. It has transformed the life. It has rendered impossible the revolting child marriages of years ago on the part of our scholars, for education must precede. It has opened a new profession to women: teaching; it has given in our students a new factor in the body politic; men intelligent, industrious, moral, self-respecting; men who think, feel, and live on a high plane.

Protestant missions have also trained their adherents in the practice of one virtue, which is not always noted: temperance. In a land where the Muslims are, as a rule, abstainers, but where Christianity is often disgraced by its unworthy disciples, missions have impressed upon their disciples that intemperance and the service of God are exclusive of each other.

Finally, we will note the hospital. Eighteen thousand treatments annually is the record of this ministry in Asiatic Turkey alone! Van, Harpoot, Marsovan, Cæsarea, Aintab, Beirut, are the centers of medical work. Feet that would never cross the threshold of the Protestant Christian's church or school press eagerly into the door of the Protestant Christian's hospital.

Time fails me to speak of other influences which missions have brought into the social field: of the trades taught to boys, and housewifery to girls; of the gathering of waifs from the streets to be nurtured; of the machinery and modern conveniences carried into the country by the missionaries, and of their work in awakening a slumbering people with the literature of the Western world. The missionary station is a power house, and the current it generates is rousing even remote villages with the whirr of a new life.

CHAPTER XVIII

AFRICA

Education for Opening New Fields-Capacity of the People-All Doors Open -German Missions—Oppressed Natives-Future Missionaries for Africa.

Education for Opening New Fields

REV. ROBERT Laws, M.D., F. R. G. S., Missionary, Free Church of Scotland, Africa.*

I think the best way I can help you to understand some of the problems of education as it appears to us in Africa is to try to bring you in touch with that mission field as it was when we went there and as it is now.

Let us go back twenty-five years. At that time you would find a little company setting sail from London to go away to begin what has since been known as the work of the Livingstone Mission in Central Africa. We had to take two years' provisions, and then, having gone by a steamer to the Cape, we had to get a sailing vessel to take us to the mouth of the Zambesi. There we had to get a little vessel, proceed up the Zambesi River until we got to the cataracts, take our vessel to pieces, carry it seventy miles, build it again, and then sail to Lake Nyassa to begin our work.

So we got onto the lake. Now what was facing us there? I would like you to understand that. There was no Congo known at that time, except its mouth, for Stanley left London only a fortnight before I did. None of the missions along the Congo and on other great African lakes were in existence then. Sitting down on a rock one Sabbath afternoon near the south end of Lake Nyassa, I looked away across the hills to the west. I could start from those hills and walk westward, westward, westward, week after week, meeting thousands of villages, millions of people, and, until I came to the west coast of Africa itself, I would not meet with a single missionary of the cross of Christ, nor find one when I arrived there. Away to the northwest such a journey would take a month for every week that the other one did, before I could meet a missionary at Old Calabar. My nearest neighbors to the north were your American brethren at Assouan and Cairo. To the east, the nearest missionary friend was to be found at Zanzibar on the equator. Think of all that vast region with its millions of inhabitants, with the need of each individual to know Jesus Christ as a Saviour, and with no one seeming to care for their souls!

Coming to the problem that faces us, what do we want to do as missionaries? To get the Gospel to every one of those people.

*Central Presbyterian Church, April 25.

And how is one man to do it? How are all the missionaries and missions there to do it? I can tell you. Train the people.

So we come to the educational question. In all that vast district to which I have referred there was not a literature such as you have in India and China. There wasn't a letter. The many tongues of the people were spoken languages which had to be reduced to writing.

Now, let us see the change that has taken place. In connectior with our own mission seven languages have been reduced to writing. The whole of the New Testament and part of the Old has been translated into one language, the Gospel of Mark into three others, and the other Gospels into various other languages. In several of the languages school-books, hymn-books, and other books have been prepared. On the west side of Lake Nyassa, in 1875, there were no schools, no teachers, no pupils, nobody who could read. During the last year we had in that district in connection with the Dutch and Scotch section of our mission, 123 schools open for the whole or part of the year. In these schools we had 460 native teachers and monitors. The majority of them were not skilled teachers, I admit, but if a boy can read the New Testament in his own language, surely he can teach the alphabet and save my doing it. Carry this principle throughout our workall departments of it-and you have the use of the natives in propagating the Gospel of Christ.

In connection with these schools, we have an average attendance of 15,000 pupils, the highest attendance in a single day being 22,228, and I am understating rather than overstating the numbers when I say, in connection with these schools, we have 30,000 pupils, old and young. There are some strange discrepancies in these figures. What do we mean by 15,000 in average attendance and 30,000 connected with the schools?

You say you will start school and the children will come and get a lesson. You get a class of boys before you, and you begin by showing them O and teaching them how to call it. You take another letter, and another, and another, but by the time you have got over four or five, your pupils are tired and it is time to stop that day. To-morrow you get your pupils again, and the next day, and the next day, but by that time they are very tired, and they go home to rest a week. After this week's rest, perhaps they will come back again. They remember O because it was round like the moon, but depend upon it, they have forgotten all the other letters, and you have to begin your work all over again. Perhaps you get to the end of the alphabet this time, but then your pupils will be very tired indeed, and you will not see them for a fortnight. This is the beginning of work, not very promising, not very encouraging, but we have now come to recognize this as a sort of evolution, shall I call it, of school life.

But this is not all. Your pupils see that you pay for work, and they soon come to tell you that this counting of letters on a book is hard work and they need their pay. So the boys attending school each got a slip of paper, and it was marked each day. Then,

after a month, those who had been present all the time were arranged in rows; those who learned most, at the top, and there was a distribution of prizes. The one at the top of the class got, perhaps, three needles; the next one got two needles; the next, one, and then, perhaps, another would get two pins, another, one pin, and so on; for pins were turned into fishhooks as soon as they got out of school. Then the teacher went around with a bowl full of something white, and a teaspoon, and each one got a teaspoonful or two of the contents of the bowl; and before he got around the class you would see the one at the top busily employed licking this white stuff. You may think it was sugar. No, it was salt. Salt was a very precious commodity in Central Africa.

Now, then, what is the outcome of all this? It is good. It is a hard thing to raise a population the length of the alphabet. Perhaps you don't believe me. Take a picture in black and white, and the natives can not see it. You may tell the natives: "This is a picture of an ox and a dog," and the people will look at it and look at you, and that look says that they consider you a man whose character is to be represented by a word of four letters. Perhaps you say again: "Yes, that is a picture of an ox and a dog." Well, perhaps they will tell you what they think this time. If there are a few boys about, you say: "This is really a picture of an ox and a dog. Look at the horn of the ox, and there is his tail," and the boy will say: "Oh! yes, and there is the dog's nose, and eyes, and ears." Then the old people will look again, and then they will clap their hands, and say: "Oh! yes, it is a dog." When a man has seen a picture for the first time, his book education has begun.

But, dear friends, it is not merely as an educational effort that we value this. We look upon our school work as one of the greatest, and most valuable, and most direct of our evangelistic agencies. If I could go out to Lake Nyassa to preach at a village, I might find an audience of fifteen, or fifty, or five hundred, but I am not able to get back to that village for a month, or six months, or a year, to preach again. There are villages where I have preached which I have never been able to visit again, and I have never heard of any other missionary being there.

But in our schools, 16,000 pupils are each day receiving a lesson in the Scriptures. Most useful for this purpose have we found translations of a little book known as "Harry's Catechism." Every answer is a passage of Scripture, and our effort is to saturate the minds of our people with God's Word, for we know that His Word must accomplish His purpose, and can not return unto Him void. So our pupils are taught to repeat those passages. You may say many of them do not understand what they learn. Quite true; but we find that when these pupils have gone away from school, in after days these passages of Scripture come back to their minds. God, the Holy Spirit, enables them to understand them, and we find the same people coming back to the missionary to enter a catechumen's class.

That is one result, but here is another. A boy has got the length of being able to read the Gospel in his own tongue, and he