Excerpt from Watson's Jeffersonian Magazine, Vol. 3: June, 1909 In its issue of March 5th, 1909, the Wesleyan Christian Advocate published a Report on the Foreign Missions of the Methodist Church, Pages 26 and 27. The editors prefaced the statistics by saying that the facts concerning the work of our church abroad should encourage us greatly in our prayers and our giving. Let us take a look at these facts which are to make us pray more and give more. We find the China mission first, of course. All of us are going crazy about China, - consequently China heads this encouraging list. According to the Advocate, we (methodists) have three hospitals and one dispensary over there, and eight self-supporting churches, and we collected from the Chinese, for all purposes, the sum of forty-three hundred dollars. If that amount is correctly given, it is pitiful. The Methodist Chinese Mission was opened in 1848, and organized into a conference in 1886, and yet the Church can collect in one of the richest countries in the world, where there are more than people. Only the beggarly little wad of Surely, the Advocate must have got the figures wrong. We can not, humanly, increase our prayers and our gifts on such encouragement as tlhat. Japan is also one of the rich, powerful, civilized countries, and the Advocate tells about mission work there. The Methodists have only thirteen churches there, and but three of these support themselves. Ten are unable to stand alone. They have to lie in the arms of the Home Church, and draw nourishment from her motherly breast. In the great, prosperous Brazil, there are twenty-four churches and but five of them can stand on their own legs. The Central Mexican Mission has not a single self-supporting church; the Mexican Border Conference is in the same fix. Does the Advocate mean to say that converts who won't support their churches will support the mission schools? I invite the editors to give us the facts in detail. How many schools have you in China, Japan, India, South America, etc.? How much is the total cost, and how much of that do you get from the natives? About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.