Zion's Watch Tower and Herald of Christ's Presence, “The World's Hope Not in Missions, but in the Kingdom”
“We herewith supply additional evidences on this subject from highly creditable sources … The following discouraging reports of missionary efforts we clip from the Literary Digest.”
The article argues that foreign missions cannot convert the world and that the hope of mankind lies in the coming Kingdom. To make the case it reprints several columns from the Literary Digest under the heading “A Sweeping Criticism of Foreign Missions”. The Digest is summarising an investigation by a special correspondent of Reynolds’ Newspaper (London), which in turn quotes “Sir H. H. Johnston, our present Special Commissioner for Uganda”, writing in The Nineteenth Century of November 1887: “It too often happens that, while the negro rapidly masters the rules and regulations of the Christian religion, he still continues to be gross, immoral and deceitful”, and “those native African pastors, teachers and catechists whom I have met have been all, more or less, bad men”. Those words are Johnston’s, reprinted at three removes; the magazine’s own contribution is the introduction, which describes the sources as “highly creditable”.
Numérisation de l’original (s’ouvre dans un nouvel onglet)
Note de provenance et de vérification for Zion's Watch Tower and Herald of Christ's Presence, The World's Hope Not in Missions, but in the Kingdom
Note sur la fiabilité. Read in the 1901 Reprints volume on the Internet Archive on 19 September 2026 and re-checked leaf by leaf from the item’s djvu.xml. The article opens on the leaf whose running head reads “August 15, 1901 ZION’S WATCH TOWER (263-264)” and which closes with the marker [ 2861 ]. The Johnston passage begins on the next leaf, head “(265-266)”, marker [ 2862 ], and ends on the leaf headed “August 15, 1901 ZION’S WATCH TOWER (266-267)”, marker [ 2863 ], where the next article, “Jacob Becomes Abraham’s Heir”, begins. The article therefore runs from magazine page 263 to page 267 across Reprints pages 2861-2863. An earlier reading of this record gave the range as 263-269 and the Reprints pages as 2860-2863; the leaf-level reading above does not support that. The words quoted above are the magazine’s own; the racial language belongs to the reprinted material and is described in quoteContext rather than presented here as a Watch Tower statement. The text is taken from the item’s OCR with plain OCR artefacts corrected; the page images were not separately inspected.
Provenance de la numérisation. Internet Archive item “Magazines: Zion’s watch tower and herald of Christ’s presence, 1901”, the Watch Tower Reprints volume for 1901.
Notes. Critical sites reproduce the Johnston passage under the heading “Watchtower 1901” without saying that it is a clipping from the Literary Digest quoting a London newspaper quoting a British colonial official writing in 1887. The magazine did introduce the clippings as coming from “highly creditable sources”.
Date de consultation. 19 septembre 2026 · Identifiant de la source. src-race-zwt-1901-0815-missions-clipping