their successors to-day are continuing the good
work."
It gives an impression to say that beginning in
1833 to 1840, the Punjab Press reported thirty thousand books and tracts aggregating two million pages,
and at Allahabad about half that number, and the
work has continued ever since, but the whole output
from then on to the present time is but a drop in the
bucket compared with the present needs of India.
The Year Book for 1912 declares we are in need of a
flood of apologetic literature—more and better books on practical piety—practical ethics, and in general
what will displace the immoral literary trash of the
Hindu market.
As to China, Dr. Sheffield in 1900, at the New
York Ecumenical Conference, said: "At the present
time there is an immense range of Christian literature
well developed in China." He was an authority, but
since then the amusing metamorphosis of China has
antiquated much of the literature that had been published, and the insatiable hunger for Western books
of every kind makes all that had been done seem a
negligible quantity. Dr. Timothy Richard thinks that
missionaries who could write well for the times could
do more than all the rest put together. The most
imminent danger consists in the fact that China is flooded with translations of agnostic literature. In
Manchuria a "No God" Society has been founded
what a portent ! —and the church is being shaken.
The Edinburgh Conference reports from almost
every quarter of China appeals for help against the
flood of rationalistic literature now poured into the
land. The heathen in his blindness bows down to wood and stone. That is bad enough ; but what if the
Christian is bidden to bow the knee to the divinities
of the new pantheistic pantheons of the West?
In Japan similar reports come in. The Japan
Weekly Mail contains every month a review of theological and religious literature, and whoever follows
it will not be left in any doubt as to the gravity and
imminence of the danger. What a suggestion of the
evil possibilities it is to know that Nietsche has his
vogue in Japan also ! and Ibsen, and worse is no doubt
coming.
Such startling disclosures create new and peculiar
obligations for all our Western churches, and cer- tainly for those represented in this Council. What
may we do to prevent the catastrophe that threatens
the new churches of the East? Surely no lover of
Christ and the Bible will willingly consent, much less
contribute, to the nullification of the message once
given forth by Carey and Judson, by Duff and
Livingstone. Yet we have heard on the floor of this
< '(inference enough to give us pause; how the rationalism that has devastated certain European churches
has been caught up eagerly by Mohammedan missionaries and reprinted in Egypt. I know I am treading
on disputed ground, and must speak softly in the
presence of the angelic doctors of Scottish universities, at whose feet I am glad to sit. But ought not
every man that is among us, high and low, think twice
and pray much oftener, before he consents to displacing St. Paul by Schmiedel, or allows that the genius of
a Harnack shall shape the secondary literature of our daughter churches in the East? Scotland has taught