such miraculous accomplishments? Knowing the spiritual healing is more vital, its benefits more lasting, its urgency more pressing, will we spend ourselves in it as much as or more than we would if we could go out and tell a blind man to see, or a deaf one to hear, or a dumb one to speak, or a lame one to walk or a leprous one to be clean, or even a dead one to come to life again? The spiritual healing is not so spectacular in fleshly appearance and awesomeness, and hence not so glamorous to the imagination. But it is permanent, not temporary, and in time brings with it perfect and everlasting physical health. Share in it with zeal. Joy in the cures observed. Appreciate its urgency, its vitalness. “Ponder over these things, be absorbed in them, that your advancement may be manifest to all persons. Pay constant attention to yourself and to your teaching. Stay by these things, for by doing this you will save both yourself and those who listen to you.”—1 Tim. 4:15, 16, NW.

Advance of the New World Society in South America

BACK in the year 1942 there were only eight lands in South America where Jehovah’s witnesses were preaching the good news of the Kingdom, and their total number came to 807. In 1943 the Watchtower Bible School of Gilead was opened for the purpose of training ordained ministers to carry forward the missionary work in foreign lands.

By the end of the 1953 service year 301 specially trained Gilead students were scattered throughout South America, with the prospect of more entering, and there was a total of 13,174 representatives of the New World society proclaiming the good news in all parts of this great continent—high in the Andes, in the valley of the Amazon and far to the south in the pampas of Argentina.

At Yankee Stadium in the summer of 1953 it was announced that the president of the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, N. H. Knorr, and one of the directors, M. G. Henschel, hoped to tour South America and visit all the branch offices and missionaries. The schedule was prepared so that the visit could begin in the latter part of November, 1953.

The first scheduled stop for the two visitors was to be at Caracas, Venezuela. All of Jehovah’s witnesses in the interior of the country were invited to come to the national assembly to be held there and to participate in the largest theocratic feast ever prepared for Venezuela.

During the week prior to the assembly the witnesses of Jehovah in Venezuela kept coming from the east and the west, all enthusiastic about worshiping Jehovah at a central point. Distribution of handbills proceeded among persons of good will. Radio and newspaper notices were given during the week, and all the conventioners were anxious to see how this convention would compare with the one of three years before when the president of the Society spoke to 146 at a public lecture.