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Show CHURCH IN JAPAN. It is pleasant to contemplate that the condition of the Church in Japan has been helped in recent years by our own country. The Brothers of Mary, of Dayton, Ohio, have established live institutions of learning, and during their five yeare of activity have met with a great measure of success. Their 2,000 students are drawn principally from the first families, and about a hundred and fifty have come into the Church. There is a peculiar fitness in this work of the Brothers of Mary. The Japanese in their locality cherish a tradition that the missionaries mission-aries who honor the Mother of God are to be accepted ac-cepted as the only true representatives of Christianity. Chris-tianity. Lately the Jesuits, Franciscans, missionaries mission-aries from Belgium and the Madames of the Sacred Heart have gone to Japan to devote themselves principally prin-cipally to education. There is a note of pessimism in Catholic writings writ-ings about the difficulty, of converting the Japanese. These accounts would seem to indicate that it is almost al-most impossible because of the influence that western west-ern materialism is having on the public mind. If there be any rationalism it is among the upper classes, for the poor and uneducated are yet tin" touched by it. At present 150 European and 35 native priests are assisted by 41G catechists and 389 Sisters in their labors among the 50,000,000 inhabitants. inhab-itants. Protestants have four times the number of workers in the same field. Their resources seem to be unlimited. In one year they issued 1,987,881 books and other literature. There is one Catholic publication, circulation 3,000. |