I have visited a dozen of our sixteen missions on this coast.  I have seen them in their night schools, in their Sunday-schools and on their anniversary occasions.  I have taught in some of the classes; I have spoken, through an interpreter, to many of them, I am only confirmed in the admiration in which we have always held the administration of our Superintendent, Rev. W.C.  Pond, D.D., who adds this abounding service to that of a city church in San Francisco, the Bethany.  As he was upon his annual tour of inspection in Southern California, I met him at San Diego, the anniversary of whose mission at that time in the Tabernacle of the First Church I have already reported in the MISSIONARY.  On that tour, he held four or five anniversaries, dedicating a new chapel at Riverside, setting in order the things that were wanting and doing the cognate work which only his practised eye saw needing to be done.  Everywhere, confided in by the churches and looked up to affectionately by the Chinese, his coming is always anticipated with pleasure.

I am delighted with the way in which our pastors and churches where these missions are located are taking them under their own watch-care.  It is not simply to entrust the work to the California Chinese Mission and to the American Missionary Association to which it is an auxiliary, but it is to take the Chinese Sunday-schools into their own Sunday-school rooms, to furnish teachers for the same, along with the lady missionaries and native helpers, to receive the converted ones into church membership, and to recognize the local work as their own.  These Christians seem to realize that whatever views may be held as to the political economy of exclusion, the duty is clear as to the evangelization of these whom God has brought to their doors.  And this is not only for the sake of these, but for the sake also of China, to which land so many of them are now returning.

I am satisfied with the soundness of the work accomplished by this process in Christianizing these who had known the true God.  I heard one man denying all such result and appealing to Dr. Pond.  His answer was that if it were not so, the fault was in the character of the Christ himself, so profoundly persuaded was he that some of these had taken on his spirit and character.  One of the most intellectual of these men was one whom Dr. Pond characterized to me as “a saintly person.”  The number of seven hundred and fifty hopefully transferred from Confucius to Christ in these missions, is a most gratifying result.  The work of the Baptists, the Presbyterians and the Methodists, is also of the same encouragement.

I am profoundly grateful to God for the women who have addicted themselves to this most self-denying of work for the Master’s sake.  As always in such cases, they are most happy in their work.  They see such progress, such result in character, that they rejoice in their privilege of service.  One of these pastors declared to me that for a long time he had counted these women as his “evidences of Christianity.”