[Sidenote: The Roman Catholic Church in South America.] Recent activity on the part of the Protestants in the interest of the nominal Christians of South America has roused much opposition among Roman Catholics. Among Protestants themselves the question has been debated with an earnest desire to see the right and wrong of this problem. To this question Dr. Robert Speer has given the following reasons for his belief that such mission work is legitimate and necessary. (1) The moral condition of South America warrants and demands the presence of the force of evangelical religion in a country where from one-fourth to one-half of the births are illegitimate and where male chastity is unknown. (2) The Protestant missionary enterprise with its stimulus to education and its appeal to the rational nature of man is required by the intellectual needs of South America. (3) Protestant missions are justified in order to give the Bible to South America. (4) Protestant missions are justified by the character of the Roman Catholic priesthood. (5) The Roman Church has not given the people Christianity. It offers them a dead man, not a living Saviour. (6) The Catholic Church has steadily lost ground; the priests are reviled and derided; religion is abandoned by men to priests and women. (7) Protestant missions may inspire and compel self-cleansing in the South American Catholic Church. (8) Only the Protestant religion, free from superstition, reformed, Scriptural, apostolic, can meet the needs of South America. The missionary occupation of South America has been small; indeed no country has so low a percentage of missionaries. It is said that in any of the ten countries a missionary could have a city and a dozen of towns for his parish. In some of the countries he could have one or two provinces without touching any other evangelical worker. As Lutheran missionaries in the person of Ziegenbalg and Plütschau were the first to enter India; as Peter Heiling, a Lutheran, was the first to enter Africa, so the Lutheran missionary Justinian von Welz, of whose stirring appeal to the Church we have told in Chapter I, entered South America, where in Surinam he died in 1668. It gives us at least some small comfort to realize that of all the South American countries Surinam is to-day the most thoroughly evangelized, even though it is the Moravian and not the Lutheran Church which has done the work. After the time of Justinian von Welz we search in vain for Lutheran missions in South America for many years. [Sidenote: German Lutherans in South America.] Among the emigrants to South America have been large numbers of Germans. For these the Church at home has cared so that there are many well-established Lutheran congregations. Here and there these congregations have undertaken a little missionary work among the natives, but there has been no organized effort for their evangelization as in the case of Africa and Asia.