On the flip side of the note: "Seek ye the Lord while he may be found, call ye upon him while he is near."

Got my hands an early-20th Century bible owned by a family in Ripley, New York, that had pressed in its pages a bunch of notes and clippings. One of the pieces is a faded handwritten note bearing the title, “Central Indian Mission.” I can’t be sure of the author or date, but the note refers to an 1877 Presbyterian mission. If you can look around the ethnocentrism of the note–and, boy, is it hard to do–you have to be sort of in awe of people in that era (before radio, TV, cars, antibiotics, etc.) sailing from North America to a country that they knew so little about. Such is faith. Here is the full transcript of the note:

“Our Canadian church first helped the American Presbyterian mission in North India, but, as we became more interested, a special field known as Central India was given to us in 1879 when the Rev Jim Douglas was sent to Indore.

Central India is a collection of native states north of the central province, it is a fertile section with of approximately 9,000,000, largely Hindus.

Our mission occupies the western section of Central India, with a population of over 800,000. Our stations are at fourteen central points each the centre of hundreds of villages for nine-tenths of India’s population dwell in villages. Fully two-thirds of Central India is yet unvisited by any Christian worker, so there is a great task at hand before our church; also let us not forget that the home life of these people, especially of the women and girls, is a sad one, and that all the men, women and children are like ourselves, subjects of the British Empire. Let’s see to it that India’s empire is Christ’s.”