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""EVANGELISM 221was imperative of all possible combatants for the newcampaign, and to this end we went to the churches with arousing call to service. Everywhere we strove to marshalall the irregulars, and train them as best we could, totake part in the crusade. As stated in the section above,all the mission preaching staff has been kept on the move.The majority of the staff, hitherto classed as residentpreachers, were thus transformed into travelling evangelists, who moved from church to church, encouraging thelocal Christians, leading them out in preaching bands andafter a limited stay, proceeding to the next group in thecircuit. We have not during the past year fulfilled all ourhopes in the rrotter of developing new work, although wehave by no means confined our attention to regions wherethere are churches already established. The considerableincrease, however, in the numbers of adherents in mostparts of the field is a sure indication of real life among theolder converts.In order to get into touch with the literati, we have sentfree copies of the Chinese Christian Intelligencer to some fiftyaddresses in the city and neighbourhood. There is reason tobelieve that the experiment has been successful in breakingdown ignorant prejudices, and predisposing educated mento listen to the appeal of the gospel.The Methodist Episcopal Church has hadgood meetings in two of its districts. Theyhave been stressing country evangelism and wonderfulresults have been accomplished. The idea behind the countryevangelism is twofold. First, the belief that given a villagewith a strong church a campaign of a week ought greatly tostir the entire population. Second, that such a campaignis a fine training school for the preachers. They have beengetting a good number of men trained for city work to bedone later. This year the mission will try to reach somebig market towns and early next year, about one year fromnow, they hope to try a few hsien cities. The results so farhave been very good and the workers have developed wonderfully.It may be helpful if I go a bit into detail. We did ourbest to prepare the preacher in charge by sending him books