In the spring of 1907 the Presbyterian Mission held what is called its country class--that is to say, that the men who had been converted were summoned from all the country villages to the town of Pyeng-Yang, and there they attended for several days' instructions in the Christian faith. This {236} excellent rule enables Christians who believe but who are ignorant to acquire a more ultimate knowledge of the truths of Christianity. These meetings are wholly unemotional; they are in no sense revival meetings, nor even devotional; they are essentially educational. Their object is to teach and not to excite. For the Scottish-American has a double national tradition that knowledge is strength. These meetings had been held one or two days; they had followed their usual uneventful if beneficial course, and showed every probability of ending as they had begun, when one of the Koreans rose from the centre of the room and interrupted the ordinary course of the meeting by asking leave to speak. As he insisted, permission was given him. He declared that he had a sin on his conscience that forbade him listening to the teaching of the missionaries in peace, and that further he must declare this sin. The Presbyterian missionaries do not encourage this kind of open confession of sin, but still to get on with the meeting and to quiet him they gave him leave to speak. He then declared that he had felt some months ago a feeling of bitterness towards one of the missionaries, a Mr. Blair, who was our informant. Mr. Blair assured him that so far from feeling that there was any need for this confession he regarded the matter as trivial, and hoping again to bring the meeting back to the point he suggested that they should say the Lord's Prayer. Hardly had he uttered in Korean the words "Our Father," when {237} a sudden emotion seemed to rush over all those who were there present. The missionaries described it as at once one of the most awful and one of the most mysterious moments of their lives. They were not revivalists; they had not encouraged it; they did not believe in it; they disliked an emotional religion with which they had no sympathy; and here they were in the face of a movement which was beyond, not only their experience, but that of the greatest revivalists. They tried to stop it, but unavailingly. The Koreans, unlike the Chinese, always sit upon the floor, and as the missionaries looked out over the meeting from the platform on which they stood, they saw the faces of their converts racked with every form of mental anguish. Some were swinging themselves forward striking their heads on the ground, hoping, as it were, to obtain by insensibility peace from their torturing thoughts; some were in the presence of an awful terror; some were leaping up demanding to be heard, longing to free their souls from the weight they felt would crush them; others with set faces were resolutely determined not to yield to the inspiration of the spirit