Those Sixty Villages,

In November, 1898, the C.V.M. was founded by the call for two men. A year later Mr George Hunter M'Neur was accepted as the fir.it student missionary. He had had three years' special training for the foreign mission field—one year in Australia and two in Scotland. After, in addition, nearly two years among the Chinese throughout Otago and Southland studying the language and the people—a special feature of the C.V.M.—Mr M'Neur was page 4 ordained in the First Church, Dunedin, and sailed for Canton on November 7, 1901. He arrived there December 19, and soon set out to deliver the thirty-two letters and 104 sovereigns entrusted to his care by men in Otago for their friends and relatives in the villages.

Mr M'Neur's interesting quintette of first letters from Canton form a unique chapter of mission literature: it can safely be said that during these ninety-five years of Protestant missions to China no other missionary thither ever had such an introduction to the people of his prayers. Without a word of argument, these letters—written privately to me—make quite clear the peculiar responsibility and the rare opportunity of New Zealand Presbyterians.

Mr William Mawson, M.A., has been accepted as the second missionary, and is now studying Chinese with the prospect of joining Mr M'Neur about the end of 1905. At the end of 1902 Mr William Chan, formerly seven years in Dunedin, will complete his four years' course in the Presbyterian College at Canton, to work among the Canton villagers in their own land or in New Zealand as the F.M. Committee decides.

What an honour to have been the first Church in the Southern Hemisphere to open in China; but what a responsibility the care of 400,000 souls that no Church can care for as we can! Lord, multiply the hearts that cry: "What must I do?"