The first Christian Conference has been sitting since Suturday. The members of the Conference consist of 240 Chinese and G0 missionaries.
This is the first provincial gathering in which Chinese have been represented. In 1903, 1907 and 1918 there were provincial missionary conferences, the whole of the proceedings being in English. Chinese is not only the official language of thie. Conference; it is the only language. Thoxe has been no need for interprotation as all missionary members are conversant with Chinese.
The Conference has met in the new audience hall of the Hunan Bible School, a beautiful building of ferry-conerete, with sloping floor. comfortable chairs for an audience of 600. The lighting arrangements are done by throwing strong lights fon to the white ceiling so that ai though there is good light every where, there are no shadows and no. lights to bother the eyes. The acoustie properties are as perfect as have ever known. Not only is a speaker heard if he speak ordinary tone of voice, one speaker on Saturday afternoon demonstrated that the hall was equal to the rane! more difficult task of conveying th words of one who was talking quid ly, loudly and very vigorously. What in most of the baudings in the city would have been merely loud soued without sense, was here, it must be admitted loud sound, but also sense.
Mr. M, K. Hsino, the Dean of the Bible School, was elected by a lance majority to the chair and has presided with dignity and efficiency.
The Chinese attendance has been large; the missionary attendance less than the small proportion al. lowed. The Rev. Marcus Cheng of the Swedish Evangelical Alliance and Bishop Roots have been gi: daily Bible Readings. At the ope: ing afternoon session, the Rev. G. Warren gave a review of the carly work of missionaries in the province which was listened to with great interest, especially Ly the Chinese to whom' most of the story was quite french and new. Some of the herses of the story were present in the Conference, including, indeed, the chairman whose hairbreadth escapes from Chalingchow in both 1898 and 1900 (the Boxer year) were very remarkable.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.