As soon as there were two praying women
in a village, Miss Fiske and Miss Rice sought to establish female
prayer meetings; and when they visited a village, the women expected
to be called together for prayer; and when the women returned the
visit, they each sought to be prayed and conversed with alone. This
was done also with the communicants generally three times a year.
The prayers and remarks of the pious members of the school often
gave a high spiritual tone to the weekly prayer meeting.
Occasionally there were maternal meetings; and on such occasions one
teacher met with the mothers, and the other with the children in a
separate room.
These took the place of the early meetings with women mentioned in
the beginning of the chapter, and were very useful.
Nestorian families have been already described in part, but the
absence of the religious element in them can hardly be realized by
Christians here. They did not believe that a child was possessed of
a soul until it was forty days old. This belief affected all their
feelings towards children, and their custom of burying unbaptized
infants outside of their cemeteries did not serve to correct such
impressions.
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