For a clergyman with three towns in his parish, Sunday is a busy day. The morning is spent at Kent with Sundayschool at 9:45 and a service at eleven. At 3:15 the missionary is due at Orillia, four miles north, a little place of a few houses where services were held in a store or a hall for several years, now in the Lutheran church, kindly loaned by the congregation. A mission house, to be built through the efforts of the womIan's guild, is one of Orillia's ambitions. Another journey of ten miles brings the missionary to Auburn for service at 7:30. Here is a town of 1,800 people, where we have a church free from debt. Three years ago things were in a hopeless condition and the closing of the church was suggested. But better counsels prevailed, and now St. Matthew's has its Sunday-school with forty children, its vested choir and a communicant list of twenty-five, fifteen of whom have been confirmed within the last two years. The baptisms have numbered twenty. Renton, which Mr. Arney recently surrendered, is a mining town of about 1,800 people, where there is a small church free from debt. Within two years he baptized twenty-six and presented seventeen for confirmation in this station.

Self-support for Kent is the goal now being worked for. That will mean relinquishing the other missions to another man who can give them constant attention and lead them to the point of selfsupport. Thus the Church is trying successfully, if slowly, to extend itself in the White River Valley, Washington.

somehow or other has come to profess a faith which is really beyond his comprehension. It is such a common word back there, in our big cities, in our churches, and even in our seminaries: "What is the use of converting barbarians and savages to a religion they cannot possibly appreciate?"

Now, the Indian Christian, of South Dakota at least, is not savage. He is not degraded, nor half degraded. He is, if I have so far seen truly, immensely the superior of the lower classes, and many of the middle classes, of our eastern cities, in physique, in intellect, in morality, in capacity for spiritual truth. And if we are to judge a race at its best, and judge the Indian by the Indian clergy, as we judge the white man by Phillips Brooks, then the Indian is already a force in the Christian world.

A few weeks ago I was at the triennial convocation of the Indian congregations at Yankton. I heard an Indian read the Epistle at the Communion service. I watched them during business sessions. I heard them sing the Church hymns and the Venite in Dakota-six redskins whose music would shame that of many an eastern church. I heard William Holmes, a Dakota priest, play the organ; and I heard him preach, in his own tongue, a sermon, which, when interpreted, possessed a simplicity, a charm, a grace and a sweetness of sincerity and strength of which the Church needs more.

May it seem over-enthusiastic to ask if it is generally known that there are ninety-three congregations of Indian Churchmen in South Dakota? That they number more than 3,000 communicants and 10,000 baptized persons? That they brought to their own convocation the last week in August more than $3,000, and that their yearly offerings aggregate more than $9,500? And they give not merely to those causes in which they have a special and personal, immediate interest, but to every cause for which the Church asks help. These are

33

massacred the wily Custer. Perhaps there is food for thought here as to the worth of Christianity and the quality of

our own.

“I

AM often asked by travellers, and

in letters from home, whether the youth of Japan really need Christianity, whether they are not really better off with the 'bright and hopeful' teachings of Buddha and Shinto than they would be with the religion of the Crucified? Perhaps no better answer can be given to such an inquiry than the incident reported in the following paragraphs from the Japan Mail, one of our daily newspapers:

"Yamada Naokuma, grandchild of the adopted son of Baron Yamada Nobumichi, a distinguished provincial governor, has just ended his life by throwing himself into the crater of the Aso Volcano. Naokuma had studied philosophy under Dr. Inouye Kenryo and had graduated with distinction. But during the course of the year before last his mind seemed to become affected and he was sent to his family home in Kumamoto to rest and recuperate. At the beginning of April he disappeared and nothing was heard of him until his pocket-book, found near the edge of the crater, revealed that he had deliberately made away with himself. It contained a farewell letter from which the following extracts are taken:

""How mistaken are they who say that suicide betrays weakness of will! Whatever be their condition they would preserve life. But the strongest will is his who can go down to a death that makes men shudder even to hear. The cowards

to be vehemently denounced are the multitude who dare not die, be their circumstances what they may.'

"Alas, it is said! The world is full of iniquity. Men are the slaves of lust. Their span of life is but fifty years, and with the dust of this fleeting world daily

accumulating on them, they hasten to an inscrutable grave. Is society a state of pain, misfortune and sorrow, or is it a happy heaven? How miserable is this world of human beings! Grief and care invade their bosoms; pain and affliction encompass their existence. Where is hope to be found; where may peace be sought? What is glory, what is rank? All around is emptiness and solitude. Wealth avails nothing, and nothing is comprehensible or credible. Society is

but a battlefield of sorrow and suffering, and throughout life men are as hungry demons fed on torturing scepticism.

"Alas for the infinity of it all! The tall mountain-peaks pierce the sky, the broad ocean spreads out its unending azure, but human life is as the dew of morning, as the flash of the lightning. It waxes but to wane; increases but to decline. All are plunged in darkness and know not what to look for. Mercy and benevolence are as the fleeting sentiments of a dream. Why should man torment himself with limitlessly painful thoughts; why should he wander in the paths of contaminating sin? Is it not the most blessed ending of human life to be received into the bosom of pure nature and forever to quit the dust of existence? Thinking these things I pass into the smoke of Aso's crater.'

"Aso-san, where this suicide took place, is a volcano that has been active throughout the era of history, though there are evidences that the dimensions of the crater have undergone large diminution. Its latest eruption was in 1894. These cruel incidents bear eloquent testimony to Japan's need of some satisfying religious creed."

Have you ever heard a more plaintive Macedonian cry?

the east is a series of deep mountain gorges left there long ages since by the successive lava floes. These are richly wooded and covered thickly in many places with masses of fern and other tropical undergrowth. The side walls of these gorges are often very precipitous, going up in places more than a thousand feet in almost perpendicular lines. Here one finds much wild and rugged scenery, strange freaks in early lava formations, and great masses of loose

two great mountains which are famous in Hawaiian annals. Haleakala, just across the channel twenty-six miles to the northwest, rises like a great dome to an altitude of 10,000 feet; but it is partly or wholly hidden most of the time in drifting cloud-banks. About the same distance the other way to the southeast is Mauna Kea, whose summit reaches an altitude very near to 14,000 feet. This is the highest point in the Pacific Ocean, and snow-covered a good

deal of the time, even under a tropic

sun.

The ship that brings one out to the islands from San Francisco leaves Kohala about 150 miles off to the south in making the port of Honolulu. There we take an inter-island steamer back to the southeast along by the islands of Molokai and Maui, to a little cove on the west shore of the district, where the steamboat comes to land. Here all sorts of conveyances are in waiting, and an hour's drive over a road which winds

35

road is divided into five different plantations, and at various points in it we count the smokestacks of six different sugar-mills. There is a little village clustered about each of these mills where people who work the plantations live, from the manager and his corps of trained assistants clear down to the "man with the hoe." These plantations, taken as a whole, are commonly spoken of as "the district," and as yet, as we have seen, they are only a small part of its whole

this way and that through a rugged field of lava rocks brings us to the edge of the cane fields. From here on, all the land has the same general slope down to the sea on the north, and on this slope, a distance of twelve miles along the ocean-front, are the lands where the cane is grown. They form a narrow strip about two miles in width. Farther up than this two-mile limit it gets too cool for the cane to mature. This belt of cane-land along either side of the

land area. There is yet that long stretch of barren land going away over rugged hills to the south. It is held by a few large stock ranches and is very sparsely settled. To reclaim these vast fields of waste land, where almost everything in the way of farm products can be grown, while there is no market for anything but beef and mutton, is a problem to tax American pluck and skill for a long while yet.

Here, as elsewhere in the islands, out