2. Woman's As early as 1825 mis sionaries undertook the education of girls in, India, Africa, Turkey and elsewhere. In 1835 a Woman's Missionary Society was formed at Berlin, Germany, for the instruction of women in the East; and later schools for girls were opened in several non-Christian lands by dif ferent missionary societies. It was not until 1860 that the women of Christian lands began to take the matter into their own hands. Be ginning with the Woman's Union Missionary Society of New York (1860), mission boards of women were organized in almost all the Protestant denominations of Great Britain, Canada and the United States. These mission ary societies of women are for the most part closely allied to the general missionary boards of the denominations to which they belong, but they send out women as missionaries and have produced vast extension of the scope of the missionary enterprise. The impossibility of carrying on successful missions without women missionaries to win and instruct their own sex is now fully recognized. There were in 1912 about 2,968 unmarried women working as mis sionaries in all parts of the non-Christian world. No mission field is so dangerous or so repellent in its barbarism as to be denied the ministering service of devoted women of Christendom.
3. Medical At the outset physi cians were sent to the missions with the pri mary duty of caring for the health of mis sionaries. They could not, however. fail to use their knowledge for the relief of suffering in lands where surgery was unknown and the science of medicine parodied. It was not until about 1:.5 that the Medical Mission was fairly established as a recognized channel of mission ary influence. Since that time the number of missionary physicians, both men and women, and of missionary hospitals and dispensaries has increased every year. In 1912 there were 800 men and women physicians and surgeons, with 1,638 hospitals and dispensaries in connec tion with foreign mission fields.
4. Results of Foreign It used to be common for critics of missions to picture be wilderment among pagan hearers as a neces sary result of denominational differences aniong missionary preachers. But the gospel preached to pagans by Protestant missionaries of different denominations is one in essence, and the prob lems of missionary effort in all fields are much alike. Sixty years ago missionaries of different denominations at work in India conferred to gether on the more efficient prosecution of the common work. The advantage of such confer ences was so clear that the solidarity of the different missions may be set down as one re sult of the missionary enterprise. Conferences between the different missions are now held regularly in many foreign lands. Moreover general conferences of the societies of different nations have been held with notable advantage to the cause of missions. Such was the Confer ence of London in 1888, the Ecumenical Con ference on Foreign Missions held in New York in 1900 and the World Foreign Missions Con ference of Edinburgh in 1910. The Latin America Mission Conference of 1916 was a gathering of the same nature which brought to gether at Panama almost 500 missionaries and friends of missions from 21 nations. An an nual assembly of the same class is the Foreign Missions Conference of the United States and Canada which brings together representatives of more than 40 missionary societies. Similar annual conferences are held in Great Britain and in Germany. Fruits of such gatherings are increase of sympathy and comity and diminution of possible causes of friction between different denominations and a steady advance in effi ciency and economy on the foreign field. At
home this unification of missionary interest has produced such interdenominational enterprises for the support of foreign missions as the Mis sionary Education Movement, the Student Vol unteer Movement and the Laymen's Missionary Movement.
In 1912 the stations of foreign missionaries numbered 12,123 besides about 38,000 other places more or less regularly visited. The or ganized congregations were 15,396. In connec tion with these congregations the number of persons in full church membership was Figures are proverbially uncertain agents for setting forth facts and their meaning. In any general statement such as is here attempted it should be remembered that before statistics can be gathered from the wide areas concerned many of the details will not be up to date. One thing that should be clear to the reader of this article, however, is the widening of the scope of foreign missions since the first fruition of the missionary idea in the modern Christian Church. This expansion of the scope of missions is not due to any modification of their fundamental purpose. It is due to experience of the needs of non-Christian peoples and especially of their need of a future nurture similar to that en joyed by Christians at home. Let no one for get that no miraculous short cut exists by a pagan savage can be transformed into Christian gentleman of culture. The planting of the aspiration is a miracle, but a majority of converts remain children in development. Some may use this fact to belittle the moral change seen in multitudes. The number of con verts who do become leaders in the mission churches is not thus to be set aside. Men from the lowest classes have risen through de votion ' to Jesus Christ to the highest ability, like the slave-boy Crowther of Yorubaland and Constantian of Turkey who became eminent among Bible translators; or like Abdul Masih and Imaduddin of India, whose work among their own people as Christian ministers was that of masters of apologetics; or like Dr. Saleeby of the Philippine Islands, once a village boy in Mount Lebanon, whose fitness for good serv ice was grounded on the instruction received in American mission schools in Syria. The clean and kindly lives of converts in the mission fields, their sincerity and stability influence their people. Of the 150,000 persons received into Church membership in foreign missions during 1912, it is not rash to estimate one-half as having been won to a serious study of Chris tianity by the subtle influence of the lives of Christian acquaintances. Furthermore the high qualities discovered in Christians often produce a gradual moral uplift among those who have not accepted the religious message of the mis sionary. It is a significant fact that in 1912 the missionary societies reported as income from the mission field $7,902,256. This money came in part, of course, from church collections, but a large part came from non-Christian patrons of mission schools and patients in mission hos pitals. The Bible is widely circulated in mis sion fields. Some of the people decline to ad mit its authority as containing the principles of life on which must depend the stability of the universe; but they do regard it as a repository of experiences of men, wise and unwise, through many ages of time. These records sharply touch their own problems of life and character. In 1915 a Chinese official, not a Christian, bought in Peking several thousand copies of the New Testament in Chinese which be gave to friends and subordinates as contain ing the noblest scheme of moral conduct which the world has ever known.