the school. In 1887 the school was moved to larger quarters. Dr.
Shepard is renting the property for our college, but our school
like Dom Pedro's has outgrown these quarters and we are compelled
to rent additional buildings some distance away to accommodate the
increasing number of students. There are about three hundred
students in all departments.

As we studied the situation at close range, we had it driven in
upon us that one of the greatest needs in Brazil is the one Dr.
Shepard and his co-laborers are trying to meet in this school.
Three-fourths of the population of Brazil cannot read. We need,
above all things now, educated leaders. What a call is there for
trained native pastors and evangelists! Some of the Seminary
students have been preaching as many as twenty-one times a month
in addition to carrying their studies in the school. Dr. Shepard
has been forced to stop them from some of this preaching because
it was preventing successful work in the class room. The need is
so great that it is very difficult to keep the students from such
work.

I must not go too far afield from the subject of this chapter, but
I must take the time to say that nothing breaks down prejudice
against the gospel more effectively than do the schools conducted
by the various mission boards. One day a Methodist colporter
entered a town in the interior of the State of Minas Geraes and
began to preach and offer his Bibles for sale in the public
square. Soon a fanatical mob was howling around him and his life
was in imminent peril. Just as the excitement was at the highest
two young men belonging to one of the best families in the place
pressed through the crowd and, ascertaining that the man was a