Untitled

llCHINA MISSION YEAR BOOK.ery, undertook to begin a series of Year Books forChina, and the present editor was requested to inauguratethe work. The thought had occurred to many minds,but the difficulty was in the execution. Japan might bemanageable, but China was a vaster field. The prospectus frankly admitted that itmight be found impossible to do for China what had been so well done forJapan. The imperfections of a first attempt naturallyappear in the book, but we are glad to say that some 300advance orders, given in simple faith, showed that peoplewant such a book.We are particularly thankful to the forty or fiftyable writers who have furnished the signed articles.Back of these again are the workers who gladly assistedthem in their investigations. The time has come whenquestionnaires on serious subjects will receive seriousattention and not lazily be thrown into the limbus offorgotten duties.The Year Book, as will be seen at a glance, totallydiffers from anything else that has appeared. It is thefirst attempt to describe the present state of the work,not historically, but in successive chapters, each on aparticular phase and covering vast areas in one purview. Here can be seen where we are successful andwhere \ve fail. It is "The Kingdom of God in China,"and the faith that the labor of preparing the bookwill further that Kingdom is the only justificationexistence.of itsPlans for the Year Book of 1911 are already underway. It will continue some of the features of 1910, butwithout repetition. Only movements that are goingahead rapidly will receive separate treatment, and thevarious chapters, as will be seen by the appended list,are planned to give the second Year Book a value of itsown quite apart from the first. Other additional chapters may be added on new subjects as they may emergebetween this and the time of publication.