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teen p between the size of the fee paid age to respond, would cause re we had ever been encourconnection with his religious Assisterly an image of wood, on occasion to moisten a * Vison of Antipolo has five New Mexico and the Philipage sve! the royal galleon from waves by miraculously

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ades, an each time this gaudilyMax beer Fred and the ashes with **ber false hair singed, and with

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1 Phat gives it life is the pilNMAN De sale of handkerchiefs and artes Yessed with the blessing of **** le spite of this fact, Antiberga»dage, even as Kali-Ghat was

Phe focus of Tinggin in India,

V: Sams Day, November 1st. Catholics are taught that one lighted carde placed at the foot of a shrine, and a praver repeated, will deliver souls from purgatory. Sorrowing relatives throng these places of worship. The crush is often unbearable, A father, a mother, a loved husband, or beloved child may be gotten out of purgatorial fires for a candle and a prayer! Who that so believed would not undergo discomfort? Sacristans make them move on after two or three minutes; their candles, which must be left burning at the shrine, are promptly extinguished, and coolies can often be seen carrying them away to the priests' storeroom to be resold to dealers.

In 1887, one church is said to have gathered forty hundred weight of candles worth $37 each on that one day of superstitious worship.

Sweating images are most popular with the devout. Standing in dark corners, with wax spread over their surface, they are only to be approached with large candles. Prayers to be effective must be of some length. By the time they are concluded, the wax is melting, and the drops trickling down the image is the promised perspiration, and proof that the prayer has been heard. Other images are jointed, and for a sufficient consideration will bow or move their arms in token that the prayer of the penitent before them has been heard. But now and then the string breaks, or the joints stick, and the prayer is said to be devoid of faith. Great profit is made. from dressing up doll-like images of saints and martyrs and carrying them from door to door, that they may bless the houses of those who pay the right fee, and permit these holy personages to tarry in their homes. The feel is regulated according to the length of the domiciliary visit. The friars formerly hired a man for a few pesos a month to carry the image from home to home, and all receipts over and above the wages of the custodian were net profit for holy funds!

Pictures of almost all sorts are sold to the native worshiper, with stories of miraculous power they can exercise. The pitiable credulity of ignorant worshipers is apparent in almost every hut. Dean Worcester tells of a family who secured a cartoon of President Cleveland in the garb of a friar, with a tin halo about his head, from an old copy of Judge which he happened to leave out of his baggage, and when he next visited that family he found them all on their knees before this wretched cartoon, engaged in their evening devotions! He says, "So far as

I know, Mr. Cleveland is the first American President to have been canonized"

To whom will this multitude go if they are left to themselves? Can any one question that their future is a dark one, and that, this being the case, the future for which the best class of the Filipinos ardently hope will never be realized? Thousands have gone off after a self-styled pope in Southern Luzon within the past two years. He has been convicted of imposture, murder, and other serious crimes, and executed, and yet many of his followers cling to the belief that he was to be their deliverer, and could have set them free if he had been let to escape the gallows.

When the Aglipay movement began in October of 1902, it spread like wildfire. Within eight months its leaders. claimed three million followers, and had actually taken possession of all the Romish Churches over entire provinces, priests, members, and all coming into the movement. All that Aglipay promised them was freedom from Rome, and a Church of the Filipinos, by the Filipinos, and for the Filipinos. Doctrinally he took Romish ground with the exception of belief in the papacy. While his claims were probably based upon the hopes and expectations of his followers rather more than upon statistics gathered and sifted with the care that should accompany such work, it still remains that more than a million of this eager, restless people have followed Aglipay out of the Roman Catholic Church, and more are joining the movement every day. While I have no hard words to say of this independent Filipino Church movement, I must say that it will not give the people a true idea of Christ and His power to save, and that it will leave all the more for a pure form of Protestantism to do, as it fails to edify and lead those whom it seems satisfied to detach from Rome.

The religious situation is one that must appeal to every lover of the Lord Jesus Christ. Here is a nation ready to be led to the Christ. Sick of the impotence of their old faith, they wait to be helped into the pool of true spiritual healing. Will the Protestant Churches of America rise to the novel and urgent demands of the situation? Or will they be content to apply their usual rules to this unusual condition, and go so tardily and so pinchingly about the work of saving a whole people that the door of opportunity will swing shut in the faces of those who seek most eagerly to enter with the message of a salvation that saves?

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CHAPTER XXII.

THE BIBLE SOCIETIES.

It was a Hindu who said, 'If I were a missionary I would not argue; I would print the New Testament, and would say to all the people, 'Read that!" The first work of the missionary in reaching his field of work is to see that all the people have the Scriptures in their own tongue in which every man was born. He believes that the leaves of the Word of God are for the healing of the nations. He is assured that what man says may fall into the soil of his field and perish, while the words of God are vital with the life of Him who spoke them, and are certain to bring forth some sixty and some an hundred fold. He knows, too, that the Scripture is able to reach waiting thousands with their silent appeal long before the living messenger can possibly come to them, and that its testimonies to the love of God and the redemptive work of Christ will be given with undiminished force after the messenger has gone to other cities also. To attempt the evangelization of a people without giving them the Word of God would be to write in the sand of their history. Successive waves of time would wash out every mark of evangelism which had reared no mighty corner-stone of inspired truth upon which to found its building. Carey in India, Morrison in China, Moffatt in Africa, Judson in Burmah,-these all were led of the Spirit, who wrote the Word to put first things first in their various fields, and immediately put the Sacred Book into the language of those among whom they had come to labor.

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