NO LONGER ON THE DEFENSIVE 217

called for--evangelistic, educational, colportage, native church, women's work, and theological seminary.

The American Mission in its educational department enrolled a year ago 16,771 children, while in all the Government schools for a year the enrolment was 18,712. At the head of the system is the College at Assiout, with 700 students. The Pressly Memorial Institute and Luxor Girls' School minister to the higher education of girls in Upper Egypt, while the Girls' School of Cairo is developing into a Girls' College for the elevation of womanhood in Lower Egypt. The book department works in co-operation with the Bible Societies of America and Great Britain, selling tens of thousands of Bibles and religious books every year. Two strong and well-equipped hospitals are found, one at Assiout and the other at Tantah. In the former more than two thousand in-patients are cared for in a year, while twenty thousand are reached through a clinic. With the opening of the Sudan, mission work was started in 1899, which is carried on in part by money and workers sent from the Church in Egypt.

In summarizing the work and growth of the American Mission in Egypt these facts are given by the Rev. Charles R. Watson in his volume, "In the Valley of the Nile." Its foreign missionaries (excluding wives) number fifty workers. To these add thirty-seven men and women, foreign workers, laboring in colleges, schools or hospitals. Forty-six ordained native ministers and fifteen licentiates care for the spiritual in

terest of sixty organized congregations and a membership of 10,000 people; there are 567 native workers. Some twenty thousand men and women listen every Sabbath to the preaching of the Gospel; 14,177 gather for instruction in the Sabbath-schools, while the hospitals and clinics touch with the hand of sympathy and healing some 35,000 people every year. The harem workers visit 5,220 women, and give them instruction in their homes. Two facts may close this summary: Fifty-three per cent. of the whole cost of the American Mission in Egypt comes from the natives themselves, and the ingathering on confession of faith in a single year amounts to 904 persons.

Persecution has not been lacking in Egypt during the last half-century, but to-day Christianity has won a place in the Nile country which, apparently, persecution cannot affect. No longer on the defensive, the missionaries held in Cairo in 1906 a Conference of Workers among Moslems, when sixty-two representatives from twenty-nine missionary societies in Europe and America, together with an equal number of missionary visitors, considered the problems of Islam, and how to attack those problems. No longer are indirect methods approved, but to-day specialized methods and specialized agents are called for direct attack. Dr. Watson, in his graphic survey of the missionary movement in Egypt in the volume just mentioned, predicts that "ere the present generation pass away Christ may be made known in every city and town and village and hamlet of the Nile Valley, if the Church be willing."

CHAPTER XVI.

ITALY: PEOPLE, ART AND RELIGION

DEAR Italy! the sound of thy soft name

Soothes me with balm of Memory and Hope.

Mine, for the moment, height and sweep and slope
That once were mine. Supreme is still the aim

To flee the cold and gray

Of our December day,

And rest where the clear spirit burns with unconsuming flame.

Thou human-hearted land, whose revels hold

Man in communion with the antique days.

And summon him from prosy greed to ways

Where youth is beckoning to the Age of Gold;

How thou dost hold him near

And whisper in his ear

Of the lost Paradise that lies beyond the alluring haze

"WHE

-ROBERT UNDERWOOD JOHNSON.

THEN you sit down to write a newspaper story, take your Bible and read carefully the first chapter of Genesis. There you will find graphic description blended with careful condensation. In twentyone verses you can read the history of the Creation of the World, given in full, not a detail omitted nor a needless word put in. Moses was a model newspaper man. Why, Devins, if I were to send you out to report such an event you would fill as many pages as Moses did verses.

The advice of the city editor, whose patience with the

young reporter was well-nigh exhaustless, is recalled as he sits down to write a chapter on Italy. Volumes of poetry have been written upon the cities and the people of this wonderful country, running back nearly twentyeight centuries. Libraries are filled with books relating to the art and the architecture, the painting and the music, the romance and the history of the remarkable people who have lived, or who are now living, on this small promontory thrust out into the Mediterranean. Rome, Florence, Venice-for any one of these cities and others ex-President Eliot would have to add several feet to his shelf to accommodate the books which have been produced; in a recent volume on Florence the bibliography relating to that one city contains sixty-seven titles. Italy has been called by a recent author "The Magic Land," and no other term seems quite so appropriate when one thinks of the modern past of Rome, of the period of Canova and Thorwaldsen, of the Rome of the Hawthornes and the Brownings, of the noble works of Michelangelo and the galleries of the Vatican.

One scarcely needs in a single chapter on Italy more than to refer to her primitive populations, the fortunes of their successors, the civil wars and murders in royal families which changed the dynasties of the nation, the rise, decline and fall of the Empire of Rome, the extension and power of the Papal authority on the banks of the Tiber, the abolition of the temporal power of the Pope, the erection of the Kingdom of Italy, the

THE CITY OF FASCINATION

221

successful war against Austria led by Victor Emmanuel II., resulting, with Garibaldi's unrivaled efforts, in making a united Italy. The history of Italy in the nineteenth century, beginning with the victory of Napoleon at Marengo and ending with the accession of Victor Emmanuel III., the present King of Italy, is a veritable romance. In that century, as in other centuries, the artist and the warrior worked side by side, each doing the work appointed to his hand; the statesman and the preacher lived their lives and made their impressions and left their records.

"God sends His teachers unto every age,
To every clime and every race of men,
With revelations fitted to their growth

And shape of mind; nor gives the realm of truth
Into the selfish rule of one sole race.

Naples has been called the City of Fascination. Rome is admitted to be stately and impressive, Florence all beauty and enchantment, Genoa picturesque, and Venice a dream city, but Naples is simply-fascinating. Who that has been there does not sympathize with Thomas Buchanan Read, who says in his lines on Naples:

"My soul to-day

Is far away,

Sailing the Vesuvian Bay;

My winged boat,

A bird afloat,

Swims round the purple peak remote."