JAPAN AND THE BIBLE.

Auckland Star, 2 September 1933, Page 2 (Supplement)

JAPAN AND THE BIBLE.

(By W. H. MUREAY WALTON.) Ono of the earliest impressions I got of the influence of the Bible in Japan ■was during my first period of service in that land, when I was still making valiant efforts to understand a language which a Roman missionary once described as "the devils best instrument for keeping the Gospel out of the country." My wife and I were guests at the annual speech day of a big Higher 2vonnal College in the city in which we then lived. The headmaster, a practising Buddhist and an ex-priest, made a .speech which was shot through and through with quotations from the Bible.

in certain respects Japan is of peculiar interest to the Christian statesman, for the Christian Church is more advanced than that in any other nonChristian country. I myself have been serving for many years under a Japanese bishop in a diocese essentially Japanese in all it does. As such the Church is the forerunner of what the Churches of India and China and Africa are to be to-morrow. It may be of interest, therefore, if I tell you that an increasing number of Japanese leaders are feeling the need of their own Japanese Bible Society, instead of an English or Scots or American Society. This is not because they are in any way ungrateful to those societies whose sacrificial efforts have given them God's Bible. It is rather because the Bible has become so much a Japanese book, and not a foreign book.

The use of the secular Press for the dissemination of the Christian message is a method which lends itself in a peculiar degree to Japan. The Japanese are an educated people; I would not be surprised if the average level of education is above ours. The midday edition in Japan is not sold for its betting forecasts, but for its general news. There are about three hundred daily papers in Japan. Some of them have a circulation approaching two million a day without any of those artificial stimuli which many of ihe modern papers employ in England in order to increase sales. Everybody reads the daily paper. It has been estimated that half the homes of the country take one. With the school and the home it is on© of the most potent influences in the moulding of public opinion. Now in recent years the Press of Japan has been giving increasing attention to religious articles. Like its sister in England, it has discovered that religion possesses newsvp'.c. One of the biggest papers has an editor set apart solely for religious news.

A prayer: Almighty God, help us, when we are with others, to have some remembrance of the confessions of unworthiness we make when we are alone with Thee. May we clothe ourselves with the garment of the soul we call humility. Save us from despising and disparaging our neighbours. May we havo the charity that seeketh not her own, that thhiketh no evil, and that hopofh nil thing*. Give reality to our faith in Thee, anil give,u= a more living apprehension of things unscun. For Thy Name's sake. Amen.