The Inheritance Publishing Co., Grand Rapids, Mich., U.S.A.
Many of our readers will appreciate receiving the gratis booklets sent out by our friends in the Grand Rapids, for which, owing to present exchange conditions, contributions cannot be sent to them. They have asked our General Treasurer, Mr. John Grant, 4 Millburn Road, Inverness, to receive any contributions on their behalf, and to this request Mr. Grant has agreed. Contributions received will be thankfully acknowledged and held until the way is open to remit to Grand Rapids.
Dutch Relief Fund.
This Fund is now closed. There was a splendid response to the Appeal as will be seen from the list of contributions published.
Repentance in Europe.
Preaching in Cannstatt on November 17, a date which coincided with the Day of Repentance of the Evangelical Church in Germany, Bishop Wurm said that the “Christian congregation which accepts God’s punishment for its sins undergoes a complete change of heart and thus develops a new life.” He stated that the Christians in Germany would never regret making their declaration of repentance. The Synod of the Evangelical Reformed Church of the Province of Hanover has recently issued a unanimous report in which occur these words: “Our Church shares in bearing the burden of the past years. It realises that it is called upon to undergo a change of heart and a conversion. We share the responsibility for bringing the misery of these years upon ourselves. We were all aware—some of us more, some less—of the wrong that was being done in our nation, and we did not do enough to prevent it. Were we ignorant of the fact that many our brothers were detained in prisons and concentration camps for the sake of the Gospel, and that some of them had to give their lives for their faith? Did we not know about the extermination of the physically unfit who were described as ‘unworthy to live’? Did we not know something at least about the cruel struggle to annihilate the Jews?” In similar strain is a message from the Reformed Free Church Council (a group within the Reformed Church of Hungary, whose aim it is to unite Reformed Christians with a view to reviving the Church): “We believe and confess that God has restored the life of Hungary, so that the Hungarian people may use their lives in His service . . . Our gratitude gives rise to our sense of guilt: the sense of guilt of the whole Hungarian people, and their repentance. There is only one attitude possible in face of God: ‘O Lord, righteousness belongeth unto Thee . . . but we have sinned.’” In such expressions of repentance and turning to the Lord, we see hope for the sorely-stricken continent of Europe.—English Churchman.
India.
India’s non-Christian millions present a vast problem for the Christian Church. Out of its huge total of 390,000,000 inhabitants, only 7,250,000 profess the Christian religion. The Hindu population runs to 266,000,000; the Moslem to 102,000,000; the Sikhs, Jains, Parsees, Animists and others number 13,000,000. The Jews are reckoned at 22,000. Miss J. T. Williamson, of the London Missionary Society, strikingly describes the work of Christian missions in India: “The vastness of this land, the millions of people even in this small area where we work in Bengal, the countless villages with their dense population—for one is often astounded at the number of people who collect in one courtyard when we sit down to teach—all make one inclined to think that, as someone once said, we are trying to bore through the Himalayas with a pin! Humanly speaking, it is an impossible task, but the feeling of being overwhelmed by it goes when one remembers that ‘behind the pin there is the might and the power of the Lord God Omnipotent, and one trusts one’s beginning of things to Him.’” Of the total population of India only 12 per cent. are literate. When it is remembered that India adds some 5,000,000 a year to her population, while only adding 1,000,000 to her literates, the vastness of the problem is apparent. These figures taken from The Catholic (Dublin) bring home to one in a measure what a problem India is to the Christian Church as well as to our statesmen who are at their wit’s end to know how to deal with that country with its teeming millions.
Profaning the Sabbath.
On a recent Lord’s Day evening Mr. Attlee, the Prime Minister, and Mr. Morrison, the Leader of the House of Commons, delivered political addresses at a meeting of a Socialist Society, known as the Fabian Society. The meeting closed with a concert. The leaders of the Church seem to have no word of condemnation for these practices of our national leaders. A very low view of the Sabbath seems to prevail among leaders of the professing Church of Christ in England.—The Irish Evangelical (Belfast).