opinion on the matter. Where there are no licenses required to practice Medicine, where superstition and gross ignorance combine to allow anything to be done which is dictated by the priest-physician or meddlesome midwife, where there is no such thing as healthy public opinion, there are the very elements in which the charlatan can flourish and pursue his abominable, nefarious and deadly traffic.

The immoral procedures to which thousands of women are subjected in the name of medicine in these countries are beyond recital on the printed page or the public platform. Occasionally the press in our own land rings with the story of some poor fellow who has degraded his professional knowledge to ruin morally and physically a weak and ignorant woman. The conscience of noble womanhood tingles at the thought of such degradation to one of their sex.

A great American preacher has said that one of the supremest contributions of Christianity is the gift of a burning heart to a world out of heart. The religion of Jesus is, after all, the jubilee of kindheartedness, the epiphany of exalted womanhood. The high position of women to-day is the product of Christianity. Shall not, then, the hearts of Christian women burn within them as Jesus Himself draws near and interprets to them from these new scriptures of knowledge the things concerning Himself? It is the Master who is suffering in the persons of those who are sick and in prison and are left uncared for, untended and unvisited.

Here is far more than mere cruelty or immorality. It is touching the secret springs of a nation's life. It is of imperial importance. If the wife and mother be degraded, love cannot flourish and the home is blasted. If the home is blasted the national unit of strength is destroyed and there is moral decadence. This is exactly the sight with which we are confronted in these lands. Women of America and women of Britain, will you not rise to this opportunity for rescuing not only the women in these countries, but also, through them, purifying, ennobling and uplifting the national life and conscience?

The sick and injured of these lands are crushed like

pack-ice between two approaching icebergs. On the one side is disease claiming from them their life; on the other are the hardly less agonizing attempts at treatment. "Quackery is a miasmatic jungle around which the clean vitalizing work of the Gospel stands out wholesomely." Even when death is approaching, similar Cruelty to the cruel practices are persisted in. An aged Doors of Death. parent sick and dying is often carried off to a hilltop and left there with a pot of water and a few barley balls, to perish. "In China, when all hope is given up of a patient's recovery, the custom is to dress them at once in grave clothes and to remove them to a board and trestles away from the ordinary bed, so that it shall not be defiled." Their diagnosis of approaching death is none too accurate, so that it often happens that the closing hours or days are spent in terrible discomfort and pain and the end hastened by this shameful neglect. A missionary wrote us recently from North China, saying he had been called in to a case of a man who was dying. The hubbub of wailing and lamentation was so great as to make conversation with the patient almost impossible.*

We would mentally contrast such scenes with those in the home lands when relatives and friends are passing from us to be with Him. Here all is done in those closing hours which love and forethought can devise for the amelioration of pain and the quiet peacefulness of the sick one. There it is noise and din, wailing and mourning, cold and neglect, and utter and hopeless darkness.

"The paths of pain are thine. Go forth
With patience, trust and hope;
The sufferings of a sin-sick earth
Shall give thee ample scope.

"The sick, if homeless, are transported from doorway to doorway, since it is the le al custom to hold a man responsible for the fu eral expenses of a stranger dying at his gate and he is, more ver, exposed to blackmail under such suspicious circumstances In Korea an in tance is recorded in a recent communication from a missionary, in which a sick man was hurriedly transported from village to village for a period of five days, without food, the inhabitants of each villa e fearing in case he should die within its precincts, that his spirit would remain to haunt them and work them mischief.” (Christian Missions and Social Progress. Dr. Jas. S. Dennis. Vol. I.)

Beside the unveiled mysteries
Of life and death go stand,
With guarded lips and reverent eyes,
And pure of heart and hand.

So shalt thou be with power endowed
From Him who went about
The Syrian hillsides doing good
And casting demons out.

That good Physician liveth yet,
Thy friend and guide to be ;

The Healer by Gennesaret

Shall walk the rounds with thee."

VALUE OF MEDICAL MISSIONS

"He is a path, if any be misled;

He is a robe, if any naked be;

lf any chance to hunger, He is bread;
If any be a bondman, He is free;

If any be but weak, how strong is He!

To dead men, lite He is; to sick men health,

To blind men sight, and to the needy wealth;

A pleasure without loss, a treasure without stealth."

"A thing is great partly by its traditions and partly by its opportunities -parily by what it has accomplished and partly by the doors of serviceableness of which it holds the key."

-George Adam Smith.

"A Christian man is the most free lord of all, and subject to none; a Christian man is the most dutiful servant of all and subject to every one." -Martin Luther.

"I will follow that system of regimen which, according to my ability and judgment, I consider for the benefit of my patients, and abstain from whatever is deleterious and mischievous. I will give no deadly medicine to anyone if asked, nor suggest any such counsel. With purity and with holiness I will pass my life and practice my art." -Hippocrates' Oath, from “Genuine Works of Hippocrates," by Frances Adams.