membership of over 3,361, who in 1903 contributed 5,681 yen. The two leading Baptist bodies support a theological seminary with 18 students, one academy for boys, five boarding-schools for girls, with a total of 302 students, and eight day-schools with 588 pupils.
The Salvation Army, which invaded Japan in 1895, has now 15 corps here with 51 officers. Ten thousand copies of the Toki no Koe (the Japanese edition of the "War-Cry") are published fortnightly. The Army has deserved well of Japan by the stout fight which it has made and still makes to rescue girls from the thraldom of licensed immorality.
Besides the above, must be mentioned the Society of Friends; furthermore, the American and London Religious Tract Societies, which have joint headquarters at Tōkyō, and the Young Men's Christian Association of Japan, etc., the total number of missions represented being twenty-eight.
Numerous as are the Protestant bodies labouring on Japanese soil, and widely as some of them differ in doctrine, fairness requires it to be stated that they rarely, if ever, have made Japan the scene of sectarian strife. The tendency has been rather to minimise differences,—a tendency exemplified in the amalgamation of the various Presbyterian churches and of the various Episcopal churches, the proposed amalgamation of the Methodist churches, and the cementing influence of the Young Men's Christian Association work and of the General Conferences of all denomina tions held from time to time. At one period, orthodoxy and union were menaced by the advent of the so-called "Liberal Churches,"—the Unitarians and Universalists (1889-90),—who for a brief season seemed likely to obtain a hold over the Japanese mind. But the Unitarian mission is now extinct, and the Universalists have little or no following. The German Evangelical Mission, while numbering few actual converts, claims (with what justice we have no means of estimating) to have exerted a strong influence upon the thought of the Christian community, and even upon others outside the Christian pale.
