The Birkenhead News and Wirral General Advertiser. — 1903-11-21 (Birkenhead, Merseyside, England)

CHINA INLAND MISSION. INTERESTING ADDRESS IN THE  ASSOCIATION HALL  On Thursday evening a welbsttended meeting was held in the Association Hall. Orange-road, in ths interests of the China Inland Mission.  Mr. A. West Watson presided. and said he knew of no mission, and there were many seeking to spread the Gospel in the dark heathen world, which seemed to him to be run more on God's lines, Hoes according_ to the Scripture, than the China Inland Mission. Mr. Watson spoke in an interesting manner of his sympathetic interest in the Mission ever since its formation, 37 or 38 years ago, and commented on the fact that no collections were asked for at the Mission's meetings. Mrs. Soederstroem (('her Kiang, South China) said that it was something like thirteen years now since she was accepted for China, and she bad laboured in that land for over eleven years without coming home. She had not had one illness all those years and that said something for the healthy climate in the part of China in which she had worked, the far north-west. in the provinces of Kan-Suh and Shen Si. When she first went out there were very few stations, but within four weeks of her going there four more stations were opened. In 1900, when the missionaries had to go to th, coast during the Boxer rising, there was a great deal of destruction, but at the present time there were something like 22 mission stations in that district, whereas at the time she went out there were only three—a district over which it would take four months and a half to travel. One of the several subjects suggested for prayer by workers at home was the abolition of The opium traffic, which she said was eating into the very vitals of the Chinese nation. It was an untold curse, and was the greatest hindrance to mission work at the present time. The Chinese of the present day were not what they were four or five hundred years ago. They could not build another great wall, or such great cities. They had not got the physical strength or the money. Mrs. Soederstroem also reel-red to the escaper& which had been created in the missionary staff during the Boxer crisis. Those vacancies had not all as yet- been filled, and she appealed for more volunteers. Dr. Howard Taylor, from the province of Ho-non, son of the founder of the Mission (the Rev. J. Hudson Taylor) said that during the Boxer rising nearly one-half of the missionaries who were killed were members of the China Inland Mission, and the lives of nearly all of them were laid down in the province of Shan-si. The Governor of that province enticed a number of missionaries into his yamen ostensibly for their pioteetion, and then brutally murdered them one after another. For carrying on the work they were particularly in need of young doctors. Dr. Taylor gave an interest-8n description of the inauguration of the mission, which was at first derided because inland China was at that time closed against all foreigners. Eighteen pioneer missionaries were sent, two by two, into the nine inland provinces, in !KB, and within three years 30,000 miles had been traversed by them. More missionaries had been sent out until the society had now fixed and settled work in all those nine provinces, except perhaps one nearer the coast, where other societies were working. Mr. William Soltan. of Paris, also briefly addressed the meeting.  Haddock Halibut