ywhere its aid to other departments
of mission work is much appreciated through its ability to gain friends
for our cause among those who would otherwise be inimical; and in
preparing the hearts of many to receive spiritual help from the Great
Physician. No fewer than forty hospitals, besides many dispensaries, are
conducted by Protestant missions in India today. Many of the medical
missionaries give their whole time to this work; others conduct the
medical as only one of the departments of their missionary activity. To
each method there are advantages and disadvantages; though, perhaps, the
medical missionary finds greatest usefulness when he gives himself
entirely to his profession as physician. But, in that case, he needs
tenfold caution lest the distinctively missionary idea of his life-work
should be subjected to, or lost in, the professional and the humanitarian
spirit.

Medical work for women and children finds in India today perhaps its most
urgent call. There is more need and suffering among them than among men.

(_f_) Work for Women.

From the first, missions have not neglected woman. She has been their
care, and her conversion and elevation their ambition. But, in recent
times, much has been added to this. Not only have separate and definite
forms of work been opened _for_ women; organized work _by_ women in their
behalf has suddenly taken high rank and attained considerable popularity
among Christian peoples. Under Women's Missionary Societies fully 1,000
ladies have come to India and are giving themselves exclusively to work
for their Indian sisters. All forms of effort are undertaken in their
behalf. Assisted by an army of thousands of native Bible women, Zenana
workers and mistresses, these ladies perform their noble service. Hindu
homes are daily and everywhere visited, and the seed of Christian life and
truth sown; thousands of non-Christian girls and young women are
instructed and initiated into the mysteries of Bible truth and Christian
life; and Christian womanhood is being developed, more rapidly indeed than
Christian manhood, into a thing of strength and beauty. In the town of
Madura alone thirty-one Bible women have access to 1,000 non-Christian
homes where Bible instruction is gladly received. Another staff of
twenty-one Christian workers instructs daily, in five schools, 500 Hindu
and Mohammedan girls. Also a High and Training school for Christian girls,
with 256 pupils; and a Bible wo