The Peking Missionary Association held its May meeting on the evening of the 24th, at the residence of Mr. Lowry, of the Me. thadist Mission. The meeting was largely attended by the Peking missionaries and others, attracted by the well known ability of the lecturer, the Rev. A. Smith of Tientsin, whose papers on the proverbs of the Chinese in the Recorder have been so much and so often praised in your columns for their raciness. Owing to the presence at this time in Peking of the American Board Mission, the members from Kalgan, Paoting Fu, Tientsin and Tungchow, the meeting' was unusually well attended. minutes of the pr been read and apr by stating that his ther Some years ago the matter, but not the mauner, of preaching had boon discussed in the pages of the Recorder, He divided his subject into: preaching to heathen Chit and preaching to Chinese Chriati Foumer. After postulating several truths, aper was almost entirely confined to the he went on to describe the time, place and circumstances of a heathen " audience, ninety-five per cent. of which was composed f farmers, traders and loafers, where intelligence' could not be ranked high. The first requisite was direct preaching—the doing away with all mental friction—the fixing and holding of the attention. Attention was everything in military life. The Chinese heathen audience was int a state of intellectual torpor; they did not suppose that the foreigner could be understood. They were always busily engaged. in "thinking of nothing at all, madam." They must be aroused, and made to think. Some amusing anecdotes illustrative of their donseness were given, one man not knowing there was any heaven or earth, because ho was away from home; another who only knew the Imperial Ruler to be the yellow earth of his native province—a play upon the sound of the words in Chinese. The Chinese rustic was an agnostic; the Chinese mind had been crouted bare. All they possessed Was a little agnostic scraping. The question, then, was how to preach to people with no mind'at all. A mental shock or torpedo must be administered. Although the gods were everywhere crumbling around them, they still believed. them divine, although all the time suspected to be mud, Attacks upon idolatry were always in place. The securing of the attention was preliminary to everything else. In preaching to an average audience, not elegance but colloquialism was wanted to reach the people. Ologies only confounded scripture allusions required to be explained; and there was the difficulty of the Chinese Ianguage—no term for God, or at least not
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.