South America

Confession and penance play a large part in the religious life of the common people. The priests exercise great ingenuity to preserve the confessional. The better educated classes have long ago deserted the confessional, but it still holds sway over the common people and hangs like a dark shadow over the immoral deeds of the priests. Along with it flourishes the performance of penance. These two hand-maidens in wrong-doing often thrive in an absurd way.

It is often claimed that the progress of the gospel is slower and more difficult in Catholic countries than in outright heathen lands. Such statements can be answered only by an appeal to the facts in the case. What are the facts? The Foreign Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention has been conducting operations in Brazil for about thirty years. It has been doing work in China for more than sixty years.

When we reached Santo Antonio de Jesus at two p. m. we found a throng at the station to meet us. They gave us a royal welcome, receiving us literally with open arms. After this hearty greeting we formed a procession and marched two and two through the streets of the city to the church. They wished us to take the lead in the procession, but we declined the honor and finally took position about the middle of the line.

What brought about the readiness of this territory in the interior of the State of Bahia for the acceptance of the gospel? Perhaps the brand of burning which did more than any other to shed light through the entire section over which we passed, was the person of Captain Egydio Pereira de Almeida. He was one of several brothers of a good country family which owned large possessions in the interior 150 miles from the city of Bahia. He was an intense Catholic, but never a persecutor. At one time he was Captain in the National Guards.

One of the most fascinating phases of mission study is the tracing of the lines along which the gospel spreads. This is true because it brings us into touch with the native Christian who is one of the greatest agencies for the spread of the gospel. As it was in the first century, so it is now - "they that were scattered abroad went everywhere preaching the gospel." The history of those Apostolic times repeats itself in every mission land.

Some of the severest persecutions the saints have ever endured in Pernambuco broke upon this new congregation in the Ilheitas district. The houses of the believers were broken into and everything destroyed, some of the buildings were burned. The believers asked for police protection, but the police sent to protect them being under the domination of the priest, who was the political boss of that district, persecuted the believers even more than their neighbors had done.

South America includes so many different kinds of country that it is impossible to devise a scheme of equipment which shall suit all. A hunting-trip in the pantanals, in the swamp country of the upper Paraguay, offers a simple problem. An exploring trip through an unknown tropical forest region, even if the work is chiefly done by river, offers a very difficult problem. All that I can pretend to do is to give a few hints as the results of our own experience.

The first report on the expedition, made by me immediately after my arrival at Manaos, and published in Rio Janeiro upon its receipt, is as follows:

                     MAY 1st, 1914.

by Theodore Roosevelt

One day in 1908, when my presidential term was coming to a close, Father Zahm, a priest whom I knew, came in to call on me. Father Zahm and I had been cronies for some time, because we were both of us fond of Dante and of history and of science - I had always commended to theologians his book, "Evolution and Dogma." He was an Ohio boy, and his early schooling had been obtained in old-time American fashion in a little log school; where, by the way, one of the other boys was Januarius Aloysius MacGahan, afterward the famous war correspondent and friend of Skobeloff.