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 minister of the gospel, took charge of him and drove off the mob.  They led the colporter to their home, which was the best in the town, and showed him generous hospitality.  They invited the people in to hear him preach, and thus through their kindness the man and his message received a favorable hearing.  It should be remembered, too, that these young men belonged to a very devout Roman Catholic family.

What was the secret of their actions?  They had rescued, entertained and enabled to preach a man who was endeavoring to propagate a faith that was very much opposed to their own.  The explanation is that they had attended Granberry College, that great Methodist school at Juiz de Fora.  They had not accepted Protestant Christianity, but the school had given them such a vision and appreciation of the gospel that they could never again be the intolerant bigots their fellow townsmen were.  The college had made them friends and that was a tremendous service.  First we must have friends, then followers.  Nothing more surely and more extensively makes friends for our cause than the schools, and it must be said also that they are wonderfully effective in the work of direct evangelization.

The First Baptist Church commissioned Deacon Theodore Teixeira and Dr. Shepard to pilot us over the city.  The church provided us with an automobile and our splendid guides magnified their office.  It is a magnificent city, indeed.  The strip of land between the mountains and the seashore is not wide.  In some places, in fact, the mountains come quite down to the water.  The city, in the most beautiful and picturesque way, avails itself of all possible space, even in many places climbing high on the mountain sides and pressing itself deep into the coves.  Perhaps no city in the world has a more picturesque combination of mountain and water with which to make a beautiful location.  It has about a million inhabitants, and being the federal capital, is the greatest and most influential city in Brazil.