A quarter of a century has changed greatly the situation in India. The siege has advanced nobly and many fortresses have been taken.
[Illustration: ALL INDIA LUTHERAN CONFERENCE IN 1914. DELEGATES FROM EIGHT MISSIONS.]
[Sidenote: Another Brave Record.] The station of the _Hermannsburg Society_ in India is in the southern part of Telugu land in the Presidency of Madras and the district of Nellore. This mission has a history of bitter opposition from the natives and cruel sufferings from cholera, but its workers have bravely persisted, longing for a larger force. After fifty years of work they write hopefully: “Our work in the Telugu mission is a blessed one. The plot is small, but it will be a great harvest field. Our preaching meets with great opposition, but opposition is better than a dull indifference. Had we but the means to offer salvation to the pariahs they would come in throngs.”
After fifty years the mission reports a staff of fifteen missionaries in twenty stations and a Christian community of more than three thousand. A leper asylum is one of its enterprises.
[Sidenote: A Promising Field.] The last of the German missionary societies to establish itself in India is the _Breklum_ or _Schleswig-Holstein Society_. It had been recommended to work in the Bastar land, but the king refused to allow the missionaries to stay and they went therefore to Salur in 1883. Though the mission is still young, it provides for all varieties of missionary work, its schools are first-class, it has established a training school for native workers and a leper asylum and deaconesses are in charge of Zenana work.
The Breklum Mission lies partly in high land where the temperature is that of Europe. Here in the hills the various popular religious cults of India had not penetrated; the inhabitants were demon worshipers. Among them the Gospel has been received. To the missionaries it seems that dawn is at hand; in the words of one, “there is throughout the land a rustling as though rain is coming.”
In 1913 the mission reported twenty-seven German missionaries and sixteen thousand five hundred converts.
[Sidenote: Work Interrupted.] It is with a sad heart that the lover of missions contemplates the condition of German missions in India to-day. Instead of the longed-for and expected harvest there is blight and desolation; instead of plenteous rain there is drought. These Germans, pious, diligent and successful, find drawn across the history of their work a deeper rift than that which was drawn by the mutiny of ’57. Removed from their missions and either held as prisoners of war or returned to Germany, they watch with distress as the labor of years is disastrously halted. The Basel mission which is partly manned by Swiss, is not so seriously affected as the Leipsic, the Hermannsburg, the Gossner and the Schleswig-Holstein or Breklum missions, which are deprived of their workers and deprived of support.