at different times, connected with it. The first class of girls to graduate from the College proper was in 1883. The whole number of female College graduates is twenty-eight.

The Theological Seminary was organized in 1859, and it was for the whole Eastern Turkey Mission, as was the Female Seminary. This has continued to the present time, with an occasional intermission of a year or two. It has graduated 136 students. The present number of native laborers, preachers, teachers, etc., is 165.

In 1870 a Normal School for the training of male teachers for the out-stations was established. This gradually broadened until it had a full college curriculum and became the Male Department of Euphrates College, although a Normal Department is still maintained to fit teachers for their work, which also serves as the Preparatory Department of the College. The first class who took full College diplomas graduated in 1880. The whole number of graduates from this department is sixty-six.

A great change has been witnessed in the matter of education. Our first schools were necessarily of the most primitive character, because education in this region was practically new. We have now, however, a graded system reaching all the out-stations, comprising Primary, Intermediate, and High Schools. and the College, with a uniform course of study. These schools also serve as a model to the Armenians for their own schools. The standard of the schools is improving, and the desire for education is steadily on the increase. There are seventy common schools with 3,100 pupils, and seven high schools with 140 pupils. These with the 465 boys and girls in the Primary departments of the College, and the 160 in the Normal Department and the College proper, make a total of wellnigh 4,000 pupils. These schools have stimulated the Armenians to open schools all over the field, having a much larger membership. Every Protestant school is opened daily with the reading of the Bible and prayer, and the Bible is also a textbook.

The first church was formed in Harpoot in 1856, with two members. Now there are twenty-five churches which have received to membership more than 3,000 persons. The present living membership is a little more than 1,700. Each church is understood to be, in a measure, responsible for the evangelization of the region lying about it, and as far as possible the missionaries carry forward the work in a given district through the church located in that district. Many of the members of those churches have been very efficient in spreading the leaven, and the aim is to make every church active in the work of evangelization; but as yet this is only partially realized.

From the first, special houses of the nominal and young, to read it.

An important feature of the work is that for women. effort has been made to introduce the Bible into all the Christian population and to prepare all the people, old About twenty Bible-women are employed, a part of the expense being borne by their 600 pupils. There is no agency which at so small expense is more fruitful of good, for these earnest women are welcomed into unevangelized homes, where their pupils are mostly found, and through their labors the leaven of the gospel is introduced and is silently at work.

One of the most interesting features of the evangelical movement in this station is the home missionary work, which was begun about twenty years ago in Koordistan, the extreme eastern part of this field. It was undertaken by the churches here, but it has enlisted the aid of most of the evangelical churches throughout the country. Six places are occupied in Koordistan, and twelve persons are employed. A part of the expense is paid by the people themselves, but all the rest by this Home Missionary Society without any aid from the American Board.

From the first the aim has been to make the evangelical work self-supporting as soon as possible. The increasing poverty of the people has been a serious drawback; still there has been steady growth, so that for the groundwork, such as the support of preachers and schools, the erection of necessary buildings and general purposes, for every dollar that the American Board expends for these objects the people themselves pay more than two dollars.

Throughout the Harpoot field there remains yet much land to be possessed. The important centres are occupied, but in order to reach even the nominal Christians many more laborers from among the people and much prayer and effort are needed. There is, as yet, no inquiry and no open door among the multitude of the Turks and Koords by whom we are surrounded.

THE EARLY DIFFICULTIES AND PRESENT OPPORTUNITIES IN MISSION WORK IN JAPAN.

BY REV. J. D. DAVIS, D.D., OF KYŌTO.

[At a meeting of the Kōbe and Osaka Missionary Conference, composed of missionaries of various denominations, held in Osaka, December 15, 1891, Dr. Davis, by request, read a paper, entitled "The Early Difficulties and Present Opportunities in Mission Work in Japan as a ground of thanksgiving and incentive to renewed consecration." The Conference printed 500 copies of this paper for distribution in Japan. We are obliged, from lack of room, though much to our regret, to omit the latter portion of the paper, which is a vigorous call to renewed consecration to Christ and his work within the empire of Japan.]

THE writer of this paper landed in Kōbe, December 1, 1871, and in speaking of the early difficulties he makes no apology for speaking from his own experience and observation of the condition of things as they existed at that time and in the years immediately following. That year witnessed the abolishment of feudalism, the dispatch of the first Great Embassy to foreign lands, the beginning of the first railway, and, if I mistake not, the beginning of the postoffice system and the starting of the first newspaper. It was the beginning of that era of rapid material change which has astonished the world during the last twenty years.

EARLY DIFFICULTIES.

In speaking of the early difficulties, we notice: —

I. The fewness in number of the missionaries. There were then only twenty missionaries in Japan. At the first General Conference, which was opened in Yokohama, September 20, 1872, only fourteen missionaries were present. At

this time there were only four unmarried missionary ladies in Japan, and the grave doubt was expressed in that Conference of the wisdom of unmarried ladies coming out into the field.

II. The difficulty of travel. There were then no railroads, very few Japanese steamers, and outside of the large cities few roads suitable for a jinrikisha, even if there had been any jinrikisha in which to ride. The journey from Kōbe to Osaka was by steamer, occupying from three to six hours; from Osaka to Kyoto, later, the choice was by jinrikisha or by a steamer ride of eight hours to Funshimi and thence by jinrikisha. When the writer landed in Kōbe there was no street leading up from the shore wide enough for a goods-cart, and his goods were carried up the hill from the wharf on the shoulders of coolies. In a journey to Arima, Sanda, or other places in the interior, the choice was between walking, a kago, or a packhorse.

III. We notice the lack of helps in learning the language. We had only the first edition of Hepburn's Dictionary and Hoffman's Grammar of the written language, the latter prepared by a Hollander who had never been in Japan. The writer was told before leaving the United States that he could not be sure of finding even those books in Japan, and he sent to Germany for them, paying thirty-five dollars, gold, for the dictionary and six dollars for the grammar. Koyeki Mondo was one of the first books published in the colloquial language, and that was printed from blocks and so miserably executed that it was difficult to read. So great was the fear on the part of the people in reference to Christianity that it was very difficult in this part of Japan to secure a teacher who would remain with a missionary more than a few days or weeks; and those young men whom we could secure knew very little of the structure of the language, and as to teaching it, they accommodated their idiom to the "pigeon" Japanese of the foreigners. There was then no Christian language; it was yet to be created. IV. We notice the fact that there was as yet no Christian literature. No part of the Bible had been printed, and so far as the writer knows no tracts had been prepared. We were shut up to the Bible in the Chinese language, without the Kunten; and to Dr. Martin's Evidences of Christianity, in Chinese. On account of the fear which had possession of the people, the preparation and printing of Christian books were very difficult, and the prejudice of all scholars against writing anything in the colloquial was an almost insuperable barrier against the preparation of any books or tracts for the masses.

In the summer of 1873 the writer sat under the maples by the waterfall in Arima, the only missionary in the place, and wrote in Romaji (Roman letters), in his broken Japanese, the first draft of a little tract; two months later, when his teacher had copied this into Japanese, he asked him to revise it, and it came back in such high Chinese that none of the common people could read it; he then asked a scholar of the pure Japanese language to put it into such language that the masses could read it, and after another month it came back about fifty degrees higher yet; the writer then took his original draft and sat down by his teacher and fought it over word by word and sentence by sentence, demanding that the words which could be understood by the greatest number of the common people should be used, and after two months it was ready for the block

cutter. But his teacher begged of the writer not to let any one know who helped in the preparation of it, as he would be ashamed to have it known that he prepared so colloquial a book. This, the "Chika Michi," was one of the very first tracts prepared, and within ten years over 100,000 copies of it had been circulated.

Of hymns at first we had none, or worse than none. One of the first began, "Yoi Kuni Arimas; Taiso Empo." (A poor translation of the hymn, "There is a happy land, far, far away.") How great the dearth of hymns was may be perhaps most forcibly expressed by the statement that the writer himself prepared six or eight hymns which were published in the first hymnbook in use by our churches; a few of them have been revised and are still in use, but most of them have gone with the "Yoi Kuni Arimas; Taiso Empo."

V. Let us notice a little in detail the great fear on the part of the people. The edicts against Christianity which had been posted upon the bulletin-boards all over the empire for 250 years, and which made the profession of Christianity a capital offence and which offered rewards to all informers, had been reaffirmed by the Mikado on his restoration and were still to be seen in every part of Japan. They were not removed until after the edict of February 24, 1873.

The year in which the writer came to Japan, Rev. O. H. Gulick's teacher, Yeinosuki Ichikawa, with his wife, was seized at midnight in their home in Kōbe because he had in his possession and read a copy of the New Testament in Chinese; and no effort on the part of the missionaries nor the kindly offices of the American Consul, nor even those of the American Minister, availed even to learn where this brother was confined, and it was only after nearly two years that we learned that he had died in prison in Kyoto, November 25, 1872. Early in the winter of 1872 the writer, in company with Dr. Greene, called upon his excellency, Kanda Kokei, the governor of the Hiogo Ken, to ask him to make inquiries as to Mr. Ichikawa. The governor told us during that interview that if this man had not received baptism there might be some hope of saving his life, but if he had received baptism there was no hope. He also told us that if it came to his knowledge that a Japanese bookseller in Kōbe had sold even a copy of the English Bible, it would be his duty, acting under orders from Tōkyō, to arrest that man and send him to prison. About the beginning of the year 1874 Mr. Imamura, now of the Fukuinsha, made a visit to his native place near Kanazawa; the writer gave him twenty-five copies of the "Chika Michi” and another tract which he had prepared, and Mr. Imamura gave them to his friends in his native place. Soon afterward Mr. Imamura, who then lived in Kōbe, was arrested by an order from the governor of the Kanazawa Ken, on a charge of distributing forbidden literature, and it was nearly two years before he was finally dismissed.

Complaint was also made to the American Consul in Kōbe against the writer, and I hold in my hand a letter received from the United States Consul in Kōbe, dated June 19, 1876, in which he says: "I avail myself of this opportunity to congratulate you and the American Board of Missions on the acquittal and honorable discharge, by the Hiogo Court, of Imamura Kenkichi, and the vindication of work which you have so zealously labored to achieve."

We entered Kyōto sixteen years ago last October, but such was the prejudice of the people against Christianity that it was many years before any buildings could be rented for religious services. The home of the writer was a preachingplace in the city of Kyōto for five years, and some of the time nearly every room in the house was occupied with a Bible class each Sabbath evening.

VI. Let us notice the fewness in number of the Japanese Christians. Twenty years ago it might almost be said that there were no Japanese Christians; the few who had been baptized had been baptized in secret, as it were. Previous to the spring of 1872 but ten persons had received baptism at the hands of Protestant missionaries in Japan; five in the region of Tōkyō and five in the island of Kiushiu; in central Japan not one. The first Japanese prayer-meeting began in Yokohama in January, 1872, and the first Protestant church was organized in Yokohama in March of that year, with eleven members. It was not until the spring of 1874 that churches were organized in central Japan, when one of eleven members was organized in Kōbe, and one of seven members in Osaka, both in connection with the work of the American Board Mission.

VII. It ought to be mentioned, as another discouragement, that before we had any part of the Bible translated and in circulation, and before we had any Christian books or tracts or native Christians, and before we could openly preach or teach the gospel, Japan was filled with Western skepticism and materialism, books along these lines being circulated both in the English and in the Japanese languages.

THE DIFFERENT OUTLOOK TO-DAY.

The twenty missionaries of twenty years ago have become, including the wives of missionaries, nearly 600. Instead of the four unmarried female missionaries we now have about 200. The waters of the coasts of Japan are now plowed by steamers in every direction, nearly 2,000 miles of railroad are in operation, and thousands of miles of jinrikisha roads are found, while a network of telegraph wires is spread over the land, and the postal facilities extend to the remotest hamlet, and these railroads, steamers, telegraphs, and postoffices are all the ready servants of the messengers of the Cross.

A legion of books has been prepared to assist the beginner in learning the Japanese language. A Christian vocabulary has been created and fairly good teachers are to be secured. The whole Bible is published in the language of the people, and fairly good commentaries on the whole of the New Testament have also been published; a good beginning has been made in Japanese hymnology, and a good beginning has also been made in the preparation of Christian books and tracts. It is no longer a disgrace to publish a book in a language which can be read.

The fear which existed universally twenty years ago is wellnigh gone; religious freedom is guaranteed in the Constitution, and there is a readiness to hear on the part of the people, in most places throughout the empire, which calls for a manifold larger number of direct evangelistic workers than are at present engaged in that work in Japan.

The Protestant Christians of twenty years ago have become more than 30,000, organized into over 200 churches, with about 130 ordained Japanese ministers,