rejoice that the membership in our India missions is now fully seventy thousand souls!
The gracious outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon this work since 1889 has given us an average yearly increase equal to the creation of sixty new congregations of two hundred souls each per annum. During the past year in two of these Conferences (the North and Northwest India), the baptisms have amounted to eighteen thousand souls. So that American Methodism has been baptizing at the rate of fifty converts every day during 1893! Does not this look like the dawn of that morning for which the Lord Jesus has so long waited when he should “see of the travail of His soul and be satisfied”—the harbinger of that glad time when India will begin to supply her proportion of that “great multitude which no man can number?”
Even already it is noted that the work among the lower castes does not appear to have prevented successful endeavors among the higher castes. Bishop Thoburn says that an examination of the statistics shows that “the largest number of high-caste converts was reported from the very districts in which the largest number of low-caste people had been baptized.” This is very encouraging. We are glad to have Christianity come with its ameliorating influences to the “depressed” classes; but we are also glad to have it appeal successfully to the educated and influential classes. It is in this way the terrible caste system of India can be, and will be, overthrown.
The genuine character of the experience of these converts is a constant source of joy to our missionaries, who frequently refer to it with gratitude. Low motives are not mixed up with it. They ask for nothing but to be taught “what they must do to be saved.” Many of the women converts (once so timid), Brother Hoskins writes, “are now even more courageous than the men” to endure persecution for their faith.
“Methodist methods,” as some are pleased to call them, have no secrets in them. They are simply the methods of the New Testament. Believing, as we do, that the Lord
