[Cover]
Mr. MacQuesten¹[sic]
Whitehern
Jackson Street
City

The United Church of Canada
Board of Christian Education
299 Queen St. West, Toronto 2

Chairman: Rev. T.W. Jones, M.A. D.D., 4210 Dorchester St., Westmount, Quebec
Secretary Emeritus: Rev. J.W. Graham, D.D., L.L.D.
Secretary: Rev. Frank Langford, D.D.
Associate Secretaries: Rev. C.A. Myers, D.D.; Rev. Manson Doyle, D.D.
Children's Work Secretary: Miss Netannis Semmens
Girls' Work Secretary: Miss Betty Ross, B.A.
Boys' Work Secretary: Rev. David I. Forsyth, B.A., B.D.

August 2nd, 1940.
TO THE MINISTERS OF THE UNITED CHURCH OF CANADA.

It is suggested that Rally Day for our Sunday Schools this year be on September 15th or the nearest convenient date to suit local conditions. A programme has been prepared by the Board of Christian Education on the theme, "SERVE THE LORD WITH GLADNESS". This is a worship service suitable for either a regular church service or a Sunday School Rally. We are sending you herewith a set of the material which has been sent to every Sunday School superintendent whose name is on our mailing list.

You will not that copies of the programme will be sent in quantity on request, and that an order card is enclosed. Probably it would be helpful if you would confer with the Superintendent as to the number of programmes needed, and see that the order is mailed promptly. We trust that the Sunday School superintendent and other officers and teachers of your charge, with your cooperation, will arrange worshipful and helpful services.

Sunday School attendance in The United Church during 1939 decreased as compared with 1938. Yet the Sunday School continues to render a service that no other agency can render so well. Effort put into recruiting membership for the Sunday School and maintaining its efficiency should produce significant results. We suggest that from the pulpit and in your contacts with the people you say a good word for the Sunday School as frequently as possible during these next few weeks.

The annual Temperance Instruction Course will prove helpful if it is wisely used during the five Sundays commencing October 6th.

With very best wishes for your Sunday School, and for all the work for Christian Education in which we have the privilege of being your fellow-workers,
Yours Sincerely,
Frank Langford

August 5th, 1940.
RALLY DAY ANNOUNCEMENT
Dear Sunday School Superintendent:

Rally Day for our Sunday Schools this year will be on September 15th, or the nearest convenient date to suit local conditions.

Enclosed you will find the following:

1. The Rally Day Programme. "Serve the Lord with Gladness."

2. The Supplement, containing practical suggestions, and a story. May we request that you read the supplement very carefully as soon as you receive this letter, and so far as possible carry out its suggestions in preparation for your Rally Service.

3. A sample Offering Envelope.

4. An Order Card. Please fill out this card and mail it promptly if you desire programmes. The Board of Christian Education will fill the order free of cost to you. Order sufficient for your service. (But do not waste any!) N.B.- No programmes will be sent to you unless we receive your order.

5. A Remittance Form to be used when forwarding the offering. Be sure to fill in all the blanks. This offering is a part of your contribution to the Missionary and Maintenance Fund of The United Church. It helps to support the work of the Board of Christian Education in the promotion of Sunday Schools, Young People's Societies, Boys', Girls', and Children's Work, Leadership Training, providing help for needy schools and organizing new schools in pioneer areas. We need a very liberal offering this year.

6. The General Directions for the Temperance Instruction Course. This year the course for the Juniors will be in the "The Explorer," that for scholars twelve years and over in "The Canadian Boy" and "The Canadian Girl," in the issues October 6th to November 3rd, inclusive. Extra copies in pamphlet form may be ordered from the United Church Publishing House at 5 cents per copy, 30 cents per dozen, or $2.00 per hundred.

7. An announcement of the new "Superintendent's Manual."

We hope you may have a very successful Rally Day and a good year's work following it.
Very Sincerely yours,
Frank Langford

"Father of Love, canst Thou forgive the blindness
That lets Thy child sit selfish and at ease
By the full table of Thy loving kindness,
And take no thought for these?-Selected.

August 30, 1966.
P.O. Box 2131
Taipei, Taiwan,
Republic of China.

Dear Friends:

A month seems a short time, and yet it seems long as we look back. Twice this month I have been to the Pescadore Islands, a group of sixty little coral islands which lie between us and the mainland of China. Only twenty are inhabited.

We have a Children's Home on the largest island, and two kindergarten-sewing class-reading rooms in the little fishing villages along the shore. The first time there this month we brought back with us three children. The mother had had seven children and then the father died.

"We will take in two of the school-age children," the nurse in charge of the Pescadore Children's Home said, "But because we have no babies here or wee children, you had better take the other three back to the Children's Home near Taipei."

The children slept all the way back, a little over an hour by plane, even the baby in my arms. But I know at night just before going to sleep they will cry for their mother. And on that wild wind-blown island so far away a little mother too will shed bitter tears of frustration and sorrow.

One of the Reading Rooms in the Pescadores was doing very well, and soldiers-in-training crowded in at night to read and forget their drear surroundings. But at the other fishing village very few came. I asked why. "These people have never even had a newspaper. They are not used to reading anything," they told me.

Are we 100 years too early for them I wonder? They don't care to read the newspapers? In the history of Taiwan always the enemy took the Pescadores first. It was called, "The Gateway to Formosa." They are much nearer the enemy now, an enemy openly threatening. Don't they know? Don't they care?

It reminded me of something I had read, "A woman lacking true culture is said to betray by her conversation a mind of narrow compass, bounded on the north by news of the weather, on the east by her children, on the south by her ailments, and on the west by her clothes."- Burton Kingsland.

Our little fishing village is perhaps the same way, "bounded on the north by news of the weather, on the east by the fishing possibilities, etc." We are going to move the Reading Room to Ma-Kung, the largest town on the island, where there are tens of thousands who want to read. We have already found a place, and by next week it will be an accomplished fact.

The Pescadore Islands are very flat and twice in geological history they have been covered by the sea. Even today the people always live in fear of a tidal wave that could sweep over them, or an earthquake under the sea that might submerge them again. In one place you can go in a boat and see the walls of a city under the sea, a city that once proudly stood, safe and secure on the land. "It could happen again" runs as an undercurrent thought of those who are educated.

We have had all sorts of interesting experiences with our Trade Centers for the mountain girls and for the poor people on the Salt Coast. Usually when a new Center is set up there is a great influx of girls and much talk and enthusiasm. For the first few months the girls work industriously and happily. Then comes a lull.

"Do we have to work this hard for money?" seems to be the unspoken question. Mountain girls are used to physically strenuous works but with spells of laziness interwoven. They work if they feel like it or are hard-driven by the fact that otherwise they would have nothing to eat. But after they are paid, they "rest on their oars" not thinking ahead of needs, not worrying about another day.

"If you have patience and learn to do the embroidery well or learn to make clothes well, then you can earn three times as much money without the wretchedness of digging on the mountain-sides," we carefully explain. Always we have a sturdy core of girls who listen and realize the worth of training, and always there are those with hearts like butterflies who learn a bit of each trade and then flit gaily on.

We are now very busy getting the schools ready for opening. At one of our Girls' Schools, like Ben Hur's chariot tearing down on us, so the surly airfield has shoved us over taking some of our school land, and now it leans its heavy shoulder against our gates! We cannot stop progress any more that we can hold back the tide,- we just have to accommodate ourselves to it.

Taiwan is an island of high mountains, range upon range of purple mountains piled against the sky. They are beautiful, but they are also sometimes dangerous. We are always having landslides. You hear a warning rumble like a monstrous bear's deep-throated roar and look up,- and the mountains have begun to move and are pouring down upon you. It is too late to escape if you happen to be in its path.

That is the way it is with out schools. I hear warning suggestive sounds such as "a hundred are coming from that district," or "We'll need more teachers, more classroom space," and pff, the landslide of students is upon us! It is too late to escape. One has to deal with the landslide.

We are making a thousand uniforms for the girls, white-blouses, blue skirts, three sizes, small, medium, and large. One would think that would make it fairly simple. But one year the big girls got the small sizes and went around all year with a gap on their sides where the waist band wouldn't meet and skirts that were far above their knees, while the little ones had waistbands that lapped over eight inches and their skirts trailed about six inches above their ankles. Every year I try to make this part of our project more fool-proof, but sometimes I am daunted.

We need text-books for over a thousand mountain students. Besides this we have our orphans and Children's Homes where about 500 go to public schools, and that means more text-books, fees, tuition, etc. All this takes time, consideration, planning, and money. With all this ahead I suppose if I were clever I would go crazy, but being just ordinary we go plodding along, and the dear Lord sees us through.

Building, painting, and repair are going on all the year around when we have so many places. This morning as I was thinking of all the money we will need for schools I noted down the building repair going on right now.

Elevator- for Pak-Mng for the blackfoot patients who have no feet and must use wheelchairs and crutches. This is so they can use the upstairs of the hospital where it is much cooler and clean. It will be something like a freight elevator in an open shaft I understands [sic], nothing like you have ever seen.

X-ray Room and new kitchen at Sin-Kang for the T.B. sanitarium for mountain patients. This is long overdue, but was held up because a bridge was washed out and no building materials could be taken there.

Painting, - all the schools need refurbishing every year.

Maternity ward, Mary's Room, at Hwalien have to be moved out from the Girls' School grounds where it had been located so that the Girls' School could have more classrooms. We have rented a place and renovated it near the Girls' Factory. The mothers-to-be can learn to sew clothes or do embroidery while they are waiting.

This month I seemed to be out making field trips all the time, starting off early in the morning and coming back late at night. At the far East Coast town of Tai-tang we took a car up to Sin-Kang to plan these new buildings.

I remember once when we went to Tai-tang by train a typhoon was blowing in from the sea. Instead of waiting anywhere along the way we hastened on thinking we might avoid the storm. However, when we reached Tai-tang, we asked, "Where will the center of the typhoon be?" "Right here," someone answered grimly while he went on nailing on the shutters.

Sometimes when we try to avoid danger, we find suddenly that we are right in the midst of it. Marylin and Vernon Tank and their two little children took a boat to Japan as their vacation. Today I had a letter from them. "A typhoon at sea menaced the boat, and the captain tried to out-maneuver it and avoid it by sailing around it. But the typhoon swerved and changed directions drastically, and the captain found to his dismay that he was headed right towards the center of the storm."

That was very dangerous. Do you remember how many American ships went down in typhoons near the Philippines right after the war? Americans then were not used to South Seas typhoons.

We have had a scourge of encephalitis here that worried everybody, and we were especially vulnerable because we have so many babies and little folk. "These mosquitoes that spread the disease just bite between four and six o'clock," one doctor was reported to have stated. I thought to myself, "The mosquitoes must wear wrist watches then. How can they tell that it is six o'clock and it is 'out of bounds' to bite?"

Last Sunday at the Women's Prison one of the supervisors who is usually cold and distant came to meet us with unusual effusive cordiality. She had a favour to ask. "A prisoner had been brought in, and she is a leper. Can you find out if the government leprosarium will take her?"

"Why is she here? What has she done?" I asked. "She smoked opium," they said. "The moving 'why' she did it?" Burns said, well, with leprosy it might have been pain, and it might have been anguish and the opium made her forget her personal disaster. Anyway, the leprosarium has a sort of detention house on its grounds so they could begin negotiations.

Every Sunday it strikes me afresh how sad the faces are of the women in prison. We who are mature know that even outside the prison nearly all grown people have subterranean rivers of secret sorrows that drain off their happiness and joy. It is not necessarily wrong-doing that brings this about, - often it is a brush with tragedy which affects their lives. But in prison those rivers of secret sorrow are deeper, more pronounced.

If they were set free could they manage better and steer clear of breaking of laws one wonders? Only a safe and sure connection with Christ can hold them in this complex world we believe.

At the end of September we leave again for the Sates for a Speaking Tour to secure scholarships for our mountain students. We will enclose the schedule of where we will be and when. The happiest thing that can happen at home in America is to meet those who receive our letters and who help us, shoulder to shoulder, with the Lord's work here.

Hoping to see you all soon, I am

Yours in His service,

Lillian R. Dickson

"To the giver shall be given;
Who, seeking for himself alone,
Ever entered heaven?"-C. Seymour

Ways to Help.
Mountain Work (Aborigines)

Our mountain preachers are not getting enough to eat. They have to spend most of their time working hard at farming the mountainsides in order to eke out a poor subsistence. We would like to free them from this grinding life so they could give more time to evangelistic and pastoral work. We would like to supplement their earning with $10 a month. We will send you a picture and information about the pastor you support.
Great Need- Mountain Work

We have still many kindergarten teachers who have no sponsors. They are all graduates of our schools, and they teach in the little mountain churches. To support a teacher costs ten dollars a month. All the happiness she brings the children of the village is your gift to them. You will receive a picture of your teacher and information about her. You will receive a picture of your teacher and information about her.
Open Mountain Work

1. We have four maternity wards for mountain mothers, and we give a layette to each baby born there. Mothers in other more fortunate lands might like to help these mothers who have so little.

2. We have four T.B. sanitariums for the mountain people. All this is free. Our work with the T.B. patients is the most poorly supported, and yet it is one phase of "opening doors with love in practical action." We would be glad to have anybody share in this work.

3. We have two Babies' Homes for mountain babies who are under-nourished and very ill.

4. We try to give each kindergarten an organ which costs $50. Not only does this bring happiness and cheer to the kindergarten, but it makes it possible a choir for the young people of the mountain church.
Special

Rescue Home for street boys. We still need help with this venture. Help to "prime the pump".
Christian Conference Grounds for Interdenominational Use.

1. A Boys' and Girls' Dormitory could be completed for $8000 each for the Conference Grounds. This also could be in memory of someone. However, a two-story building with capacity for 200 would cost $20,000 and this would be more satisfactory.
Other Information

1. We would be very glad if you would remember The Mustard Seed, Inc. in your will. One legacy came just in time for us to purchase the land for one Children's Home Compound. Now 222 children play happily on the green grass and gather at night in the seven brick bungalows which are their Homes. I am sure that looking down from Heaven the donor is very pleased with her last gesture of love. Because we live so closely with the nationals we can use the money very well in helping a multitude of the most needy.

2. Please do not send "used Christmas cards" to the Glendale office. They cannot ship them out as relief as this is forbidden, and they have no money to pay the postage here. If you want the cards to be used in Taiwan, you must send directly to Taiwan all the way.

GIFTS FOR THE LORD'S WORK HERE can be sent as ordinary checks made out to "The Mustard Seed, Inc." which is the name of our interdenominational faith work. You will receive a receipt for income-tax deduction. It will be deposited, we will be notified, and we will also acknowledge it to you. Please send it to
The Mustard Seed, Inc.
1377 East Colorado Street
Glendale, California 91205
Or Box 2131
Taipei, Taiwan
Republic of China

For travelers coming to Taiwan, our office tel. number is 44454, and office address is 73 East Nanking Road, Section 3, Taipei. For letters P.O. Box 2131 is preferable.

We draw a large check a few times each month as "loaves and fishes" for the multitude we serve. If you prefer to send it direct to Taiwan, that is all right too. There is no need to get any special kind of check, just an ordinary one or ordinary money order will do.

In Canada checks can be sent through the Evangelical Christian, 241 Yonge St., Toronto, for Canadian Income-Tax Deductible Receipt.

¹ For more information on Rev. Calvin McQuesten go to the Homepage and click on Family and then on Calvin's photo.