Part 4 (2/2)
The illiteracy of this, the most enlightened land of South America, is 50 per cent. of the population. Thus it is seen that the brightest spot in South America has appalling need of Protestant Christianity.
Looking at the problem in the large, there is in South America a population of approximately 49,000,000. In the whole continent there are only 881 Protestant missionaries. If we omit the wives of missionaries from the calculations this gives to each worker a population of 83,050 and a field of 12,450 square miles, or more than nine times the size of Rhode Island.
New York State has 42,558 primary and high school teachers. If we omit the teachers in the two lands farthest north in South America; namely, Venezuela and Colombia, New York has as many teachers as all of the South American continent.
The illiteracy of the United States, even including all those who cannot read or write among immigrants and Negroes, is only 10.7 per cent., while the lowest per cent. of illiteracy in any country in South America is 50 and the highest nearly 90.
It would perhaps be a fair estimate to say that at least three out of four people in the South American lands live where they will probably not hear the message of Christ from Protestant missionaries in any adequate way in this generation unless the Church greatly multiplies its missionary agencies in South America.
IV. AFRICA
There are three Africas, each with its difficult problems.
_Christian Africa_ is at the southern end of the continent where live nearly five and one-half million people. This is more nearly evangelized than any other portion of the continent. Some notable Christian leaders have been developed in South Africa, of whom the Rev. Andrew Murray is one of the most widely known. In Abyssinia is the old Coptic Church which is without much real Christian life.
_Pagan Africa_ comprises the greatest solid ma.s.s of paganism on the earth.
_Mohammedan Africa_ numbers at least forty millions of population spread over the vast regions from the Equator to the Mediterranean Sea. With the exception of Abyssinia, Liberia and Sierra Leone, practically the whole of North Africa is under the sway of the false prophet and even in the lands mentioned the pressure of Mohammedan invasion is rapidly growing more severe.
The intellectual task on this educational frontier of the world is indicated by the fact that there are 843 languages and dialects on the continent. The Edinburgh Conference estimated that in Pagan and Mohammedan Africa combined there are a hundred millions of people without a written language or even an alphabet of their own.
On the whole continent of Africa there are 3,244 missionaries, each with a parish of 3,614 square miles and 46,239 people. There is only a handful of missionaries to guard 3,000 miles of Mediterranean coast from Egypt to Gibraltar. From Khartum to Uganda, along the rich Nile valley, a distance of 1,000 miles, there are about a dozen missionaries.
As far as the proportion of missionaries to population is concerned, Africa is much better supplied than Asia, yet in Africa there are five great blocks of territory which are unoccupied and other areas with missionaries only around the fringes or reaching only a small fraction of the people. These areas are irregular in shape and the lines bounding them have been drawn so as to exclude all mission stations.
Some of the people in them no doubt are hearing the gospel, but there are no resident missionaries in any of them, according to the maps of the _World Atlas of Christian Missions_.
The smallest of these five unoccupied areas is in Portuguese and German East Africa. It is four times the size of the State of New York.
A second near the west coast, south of the equator, has three times the extent of New England.
The third near the west coast, south of the equator, would make eight States as large as Iowa. In Iowa there are at least 4,000 ordained ministers, to say nothing of other Christian workers, but in this block of territory, eight times as large as Iowa, there is not a single ordained missionary.
Another region, some distance north of the one just mentioned, without missionaries, is 1,500 miles long and 500 miles wide.
Last of all, if we omit the mission stations on the Nile and a few scattered workers around the fringes, there is in the upper half of the continent a block of territory nearly as large as the United States but with a scattered population estimated at fifteen millions, without resident missionaries. Starting from the Nile River, 1,000 miles from its mouth, a traveler could go directly westward through the heart of the continent nearly three thousand miles before reaching the next mission station on the west coast. If he started at the mouth of the Sobat River, about 2,000 miles from Cairo, the nearest mission station to the west is 1,500 miles away, in Northern Nigeria. In all those weary miles there is not a single church spire pointing toward the stars or a home where a missionary family lives.
Taking the continent as a whole, there are at least fifty millions of people who are not only entirely outside the reach but even of the plans of any missionary society now at work on the continent.
V. ASIA
In Asia live more than one half of the human race. Accepting the figures of the _Statesman's Year Book_, the population of the world is 1,698,552,204. The population of Asia is given as 958,781,233. Of every hundred people in the earth fifty-six live in Asia. Of these fifty-six, forty-three out of every hundred live in China and India.
Asia as a whole has 9,013 workers, according to the _World Atlas of Christian Missions_, each having an average parish of 1,781 square miles, containing an average of 106,377 people. Let us survey the continent, ”beginning from Jerusalem.”
=1. The Near East.=--The Asiatic Levant, or Near East includes _Turkey_, _Persia_, and _Arabia_. This territory has an area of 2,381,310 square miles and a population of a little more than thirty-four millions. This region where Christ was born and wrought his mighty works is to-day in desperate need of his message and life.
(1) Turkey has an area of 693,610 square miles, and is therefore more than eighty-six times the size of Ma.s.sachusetts. This great area has only 2,836 miles of railroad, while Pennsylvania with one fifteenth its area has 15,415 miles. Turkey includes Asia Minor, Armenia, Kurdistan, Mesopotamia, Syria, and a portion of Arabia. Turkey has a population of 17,683,550, fourteen millions of whom are Mohammedans and the rest divided among Christian churches; a majority of these are in Asia Minor and Armenia. There are only 354 missionaries, including wives, in all Turkey. The Mohammedan population is practically untouched, since a majority of the missionaries for political and other reasons have devoted comparatively little of their time to them.
(2) Persia is nearly as large as Turkey but has not more than one half of the population. The country extends about 700 miles north and south and 900 miles east and west. Millions of the people are difficult of access because Persia has only six miles of railroad, and political conditions have been unfavorable to missionary effort. This railroad was opened in 1888, and since that time no other railroads have been built. Not only are there no railroads but only a few good carriage roads. Twelve of these cities have a population ranging from thirty thousand in Kashan to two hundred and eighty thousand in Teheran, the capital. Four of the large cities have not been occupied by missionaries. There are eighty-four missionaries for the more than nine and a half millions of population.
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