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difficulties of such work are enormous. Opposition has been fierce; ignorance and fanatical bigotry have been encountered in their most belligerent forms. The evangelization of Muhammedan people has been called the Gibraltar of Heathendom, the impregnable rock against which Christianity has seemed to make little progress. Any plan of operations professing to be specially adapted to overthrow these great and allied forces deserves most earnest consideration. Medical Missions claim to constitute such a plan. At Busrah, Arabia, Dr. Worrell treated nearly 1,000 Moslems during 1897, and by this means the Gospel was proclaimed to hundreds, scarcely one of whom, but for the medical work, would have come within sound of the good tidings of salvation.

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Similar testimony comes from Ispahan, Persia, West Africa, Egypt, Palestine, and Kashmir. No student of Medical Missions will challenge the statement that Medical Missions are the most important manifestation at the present time in the whole world of the practical spirit of Christianity." It is this essentially practical character which appeals to the feelings of those whose hearts are case-hardened against the impact of doctrine. It is the sesame which opens the heart when the keys of persuasion, argument, invitation and education have failed to move the bolt. The medical missionary has not to go out and seek the indifferent. They come to him of their own accord; perhaps at first it is but for the material benefits which he can confer upon them, but this affords him a splendid theatre of demonstrating Christianity in action, which, followed up by teaching, rapidly breaks down bigotry and makes the patient realize in the physician a fellow man who has a higher, deeper and sweeter motive in life than any to which his creed has given him access. It has been stated that Dr. Mackenzie, of Tien-tsin, was made instrumental in bringing more souls to Christ in one year than all the other members of the mission put together. We would not, however, stake the reputation of Medical Missions on any such statistical ratio of conversions compared with those due to other forms of work. If the results were tabulated, it

Results of Medical

Missions-Spiritually Numerous and Far-reaching.

would probably be found that Medical Missions were able to show a smaller proportion of conversions than other lines of missionary activity. When one remembers how many seemed to come to Christ, seeking only that their lameness might be healed, or their leprosy cleansed, and caring little or nothing for His invitation, "Take My yoke upon you and learn of Me," we are not surprised if the same be true with His followers.

"Yet it was well, and Thou hast said in season,

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As is the Master shall the servant be.'

Let me not subtly slide into the treason

Seeking an honor which they gave not Thee."

We believe that if the results were but one-tenth of what they are, they would still be worth having because the prosecution of such work is a magnificent object-lesson. Many of these children, standing in shadow, in spiritual intelligence, will appreciate better the spectacular tableaux vivantes of Christian love than a closely reasoned thesis on the subject.

But the results of medical evangelism are by no means small. They are both numerous and far-reaching. The Bishop of Victoria, Hong Kong, who has been connected with the diocese twenty-two years, says, “I have known convert after convert in our hospital at Ningpo, and I can certainly point most distinctly to three churches which have been born in it." The first convert of that hospital was an opium smoker, who came to be cured. He asked that an evangelist might be sent to his own home in a distant city. One was sent and two years later thirtyseven converts were baptized through the work of the hospital patient and the native preacher. Now there is a strong church of 700 baptized believers.

One of the medical missionaries of the London Mission at Amoy, China, states that 1,200 to 1,400 towns and villages are yearly represented at the hospital. As a result of the cure of one man seventeen years ago, no less than seven Christian congregations have been formed, with a membership of from thirty to one hundred in each. Dr. Gillison told the author of seven men coming to his hospital at Hankow from a distance of 320 miles. He operated for cataract on the eye of one man and restored

the sight. He said he would do the same for the other eye in three months' time. Gillison forgot about the case, but three months after the man returned with fortyseven others!

In reply to inquiries in a Chinese city, one well-known worker says: "Nearly all admitted to the church in this city have been brought in through the hospital." Another estimates that "one-third of the membership is the result of the influence of hospital work." Another writes, "The majority of those who have been admitted here to our church were from the hospital." A writer in the Church Missionary Intelligencer says: "I will mention one thing that I learned in talking with the American missionaries. They told me-several, if not all of themthat they scarcely ever met with a person interested in Christianity, or a Christian inquirer, in the villages within a radius of 150 miles from Hang-chow who had not been brought to be interested and to inquire through the teaching in hospital." The twenty-second annual report of the Mission to Lepers in India and the East mentions that more than 200 lepers had confessed Christ. There are now over 1,000 professing Christians in these leper asylums.

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In China a missionary physician successfully operated on the eyes of a parent and her two daughters. The mother had never gazed into the faces of her children before, and her delight and gratitude knew no bounds. The light shone in further and deeper than mere visual perception and revealed to her and her daughters the sight of the Lord Jesus standing over them as the One Who had died to save and redeem. Father and mother and both girls were converted and through their influence a successful little church of a hundred persons now meets for worship in their village.

And the influence of Medical Missions is far-reaching in more than a geographical sense. "Now I hold," wrote a Chinese missionary, "that of the thirty thousand who have passed through our wards and whose homes are scattered over an area three or four times larger than England, everyone may be taken as a centre of influence more or less favorable to Western thought and Western men,

and so to the messengers of Christ, and thus by the work done at our hospital we are preparing the way for future conversions on a pentecostal scale."

Many definite spiritual results must ever be unknown. This is naturally the case when the attraction of medical aid draws patients from far-away places to which they return when cured, and are often lost to subsequent observation. The germinating power of this seed, sown in uncongenial soil away from Christian help and sympathy, is constantly filling those on the field with praise.

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Some years ago a mandarin who had lost his nose presented himself before a medical missionary. He had heard of the high repute of the foreign physician and he wanted to test it by getting him to make him a new nose. Other surgeons had been asked, but all were too busy with more important duties. At length he reached this hospital, 1,000 miles from home. The doctor took him in for three months and then he went away with what he came for a new nose. It was not a very handsome one," says the doctor, "but was a nose, made of his own flesh and blood. He said I had made him a foreigner's nose instead of a Chinaman's, but he was so proud of it, nevertheless, that he carried a little mirror in his sleeve, and was continually looking at this new facial ornament. This gentleman took away from our hospital also something which he did not come for a more or less extensive knowledge of the Gospel and while in the hospital had read the New Testament through and through. But he read it only that he might argue against it, and when he left us was so bitterly opposed to Christianity that I put him down in my notebook as a surgical success, but an evangelical failure.' That entry I must now confess was a record of lack of faith in me. I ought to have known that so much Gospel truth was not likely to lie dormant in that man's heart, and it did not. Last year the news reached me that in his distant home that gentleman had gone to the missionary, professed his faith in Jesus and had been received by baptism into the Christian Church." Doubtless, in scores and hundreds of villages in India, China and elsewhere there are similar cases. Surely, surely, the results of Medical Missions are spiritually numerous and far-reaching!

INFLUENCE OF MEDICAL MISSIONS

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