Lerrers continue to pour in upon us are engaged in famine relief, until while some of our readers grumble at so much of our space being taken up with these distressing recitals, we might more justly exclaim with the preacher, "Ah! but you don't know how much we keep buck!" The missionaries feel it to be! their duty to give full accounts of what they are doing with the large sums that have been entrusted to them, and itis the duty of the contributors of those sums not to be merely content with giving their money and then washing their hands of the matter, but to follow the missionaries into the huts of the recients, and put fresh heart into them sympathy with their work, It is a little thing to do, to read the reports! that flow in on us, but the knowledge that their reports are read and appreciated must encourage those who are distributing relief. hey are. takin, full advantage of one of the grandest opportunities for the display of the three great Christian virtues; in faith they are reviving hope in the starving, and this is indeed charity.
It is too, as ever, the charity which blesseth him that gives and him that tak It is impossible that the status of the missionaries in the popular opinion in Shantung and Manchuria should not be markedly raised. 'That the Chinese are careless of hwnan life is a popular view of their character, but there is' only a grain of truth in it. Like most Orientals, when death seems to be inevitable they accept it with the stolidity that fatalism inspires, but to " save life is as meritorious in China as in the 'West, and over and over again we read how the poor villagers crowd round the missionaries' carts, or kneel and kowtow before them in the road, hailing them as the Savers of Life. This the children hear and repeat to each other and remember, and to the coming generation the missionary will be the saver of life} temporal, and hence will be listened to more readily when he strives to be the saver of life eternal. Nor can the trials the missionaries are going through in their self-imposed and self=denying task fail to work favourably on themsel The hasty observer is fond of s: that the Chinaman does not know what gratitude is, but the missionaries know better. The patience and resignation which they find everywhere too must strengthen their appreciation of the people among whom they are labouring, and their work is calling out their own highest qualities. See how in Shanghai if a case of measles or scarlet fever occurs, the house is put quarantine and their nearest friends avoid the victims themselves and all who live in the same house for weeks to save themselves from the merest chance of infection, No such fear deters the missionaries, men and women, from their labour of love in its highest sense. Mr. Wylie writes from Moukden in a letter which we have no space to print in full; "in a small village of fifty families every house we entered, fi from the missionaries and others who contained three or four children who had small-pox. Most of the cases were very bad." This is a heroism which few even of those who most depreciate missionary labour would care to imitate. Nor are the huts themselves, with their dirt and foul swells and incidental fevers pleasant to go into. "Sometimes," says Mr. Wylie, "two or three poole in the same family were blind. in addition to the cases of blindness which was occasioned in other ways, there were many cases which the dense smoke and the want of cleaulines must have given rise to." There are other horrors which we need not specify which dirt and overcrowd-ug and starvation give rise to, to all of which the distributors of relief subject themselves; and their reward is subjective. And they may truly feel, though they may be too modest to say it, that they are not only saving the lives of thousands of Chin but they are also strengthening their own character, and directly raising the popular estimation of every foreigner in China.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.