I have read today with great interest and inspiration Dr. Shakespeare’s address printed in the Baptist World. I want to have a part in helping to bring some of the European brethren to the meeting in Philadelphia. I am sending you through the Japanese postoffice here an international money order for United States gold $2.50 for that purpose. The order will be forwarded to you by the Japanese postoffice department at Tokio.I have learned from some of the brethren here that there is quite a colony of the Russian Baptist brethren settled in Manchuria just east of Harbin on the Siberian railway. Harbin is the junction point, as you doubtless know, of the Siberian railway and the South Manchurian railway. If it is my pleasure to go to Manchuria this summer or fall, as I hope, I want to visit them and learn something about them and their work. I hope if the board decides to open Man that can get into permanent touch with these and other Baptist brethren in Manchuria and Siberia and aid them in the upbuilding of a strong Baptist cause in that important and rapidly developing section where European civilization is infringing upon Oriental civilization along a frontier thousands of miles long. Put name [sic- Putnam] Weale in books has shown that a mighty Russian tide of immigration is flowing east into the rich country equal to the combined area of the United States and Canada, lying between the Ural mountains and Lake Baikal and which will be one of the greatest granaries of the world and that the Chinese are, on the other hand, turning the grassy plains of Mongolia into farms moving west at the rate of ten miles a year. Into this great new country where these two waves of immigration are flowing from Christian Europe to the east and from pagan China to the west, I have a vision an army of Russian Baptists coming with the eastward-flowing tide and a band of American Baptist missionaries and Chinese Christians going with the westward-flowing tide, both bodies planting Baptist churches and schools as they advance until we have another great Baptist constituency won for Christ and New Testament Christianity. A vision? Yes. But Southern Baptists can make it a reality.
Look at the above field on your atlas and get Putnam Weale’s books from the Carnegie library look up what he says about it and it will amaze you to think of what the future of that country will be if it can be freed from Russian despotism and a free religion be established there.
========== [From The Baptist World, August 25, 1910, p. 1; via Baylor U. digital documents. Scanned and formatted by Jim Duvall.]
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