SAO PAULO CITY 
 BRAZIL 
 
 A plea for the proper 
 equipment of Southern 
 Methodism at the capi- 
 tal of the State of Sao 
 Paulo. 
 
 Board of Missions, M. E. Church, South 
 810 Broadway Nashville, Tenn. 
 
A FOREWORD. 
 
 To the Southern Methodists, rich and poor, 
 and to all generous spirits who would aid much 
 or little in one of the great enterprises of the 
 Methodist Episcopal Church, South: 
 
 To the gracious memory of that saintly band 
 of women, men, and little children whose lives 
 have been given in unwavering faith and with 
 undying hope for the evangelization of Brazil: 
 
 To all who labor or watch or weep or pray 
 but do not lose heart with the varying fortunes 
 of the day: 
 
 This little pamphlet is dedicated. 
 
 The greater part of the data written herein 
 was furnished by Rev. J. L. Kennedy and his 
 coworkers. My own name is connected with the 
 preparation of the material for the press by the 
 request of Rev. J. W. Tarboux, D.D. 
 
 May the living Christ prosper the message 
 and bless the “Land of the Southern Cross”! 
 
 JoHx J. Ransom. 
 
 Nashville, Tenn., August 1, 1914. 
 
Sao Paulo City, Brazil. 
 
 After the Civil War of 1861-65 in the United 
 States of America something like a thousand 
 people, led by ardent and uncompromising 
 Southerners, emigrated at intervals to Brazil, 
 most of them settling in the Province of Sao* 
 Paulo, near the village of Santa Barbara, the 
 town of Limeira and the cities of Campinas 
 and Piracicaba. They afterwards scattered 
 widely, from Para, on the Amazon, to the city 
 of Porto Alegre, in Rio Grande do Sul. Among 
 these emigrants were members of the Pres- 
 byterian, Methodist, and Baptist Churches. 
 Three Baptist preachers. Revs. RatclifCe, Thom- 
 as, and Quillian, lived within fifteen miles of 
 Santa Barbara; one Methodist preacher, Rev. 
 James E. Newman, a little farther off. Three 
 little Churches were organized among the 
 Americans near Santa Barbara, and all wor- 
 shiped, with much real fraternity and not a 
 little controversy, in the “Campo Church,” a big 
 shell of a country “union Church” that was 
 never finished and which could hold a congre- 
 gation of perhaps three hundred. 
 
 In answer to the call of these North Amer- 
 ican refugees the Southern Presbyterians (1869), 
 the Southern Methodists (1875), and the 
 
 ^The word Sao is pronounced as the English word sound 
 with the d left off. 
 
 [ 3 ] 
 
Southern Baptists (1870 and 1882), one after 
 another, established mission work among the 
 people of Brazil. The Northern Presbyterians 
 had preceded the three Southern Churches by 
 several years, opening operations in 1859, estab- 
 lishing themselves at Rio de Janeiro and Sao 
 Paulo. They were not backward in urging 
 upon the other and later comers that the law 
 of comity should lead them to occupy other 
 places than Rio and Sao Paulo. In response 
 to these representations the Southern Presby- 
 terians made Campinas, about eighty miles 
 west of Sao Paulo, the head of their mission 
 and later opened at Pernambuco, eleven hun- 
 dred miles north from Rio de Janiero. The 
 Baptists went seven hundred and fifty miles 
 north from Rio and opened their work chiefiy at 
 Bahia. But the Methodists opened forty miles 
 west of Campinas, at Piracicaba (1876), where 
 they had already found powerful friends, espe- 
 cially in the members of the Barros family, and 
 also (1877) at Rio de Janiero, the capital and 
 chief city of the empire. About 1880 Rev. Wil- 
 liam Taylor, later Bishop of India, opened ‘fin- 
 dependent missions” of the Methodist Episco- 
 pal Church at Pernambuco and Para. The 
 Board of Missions of the Methodist Episcopal 
 Church later opened work in the Province of 
 Rio Grande do Sul. 
 
 The story is too long to tell here, though 
 full of tragedy and vital interests of all sorts; 
 for these beginnings all prospered, and the 
 goodly land in which they were cast entered 
 from year to year upon a new era of material 
 [4] 
 
prosperity with the usual vicissitudes of a land 
 developing from a stage of exploration and ex- 
 periment to the period of great things and rap- 
 idly growing population. Rio de Janeiro has 
 grown from some two hundred thousand inhab- 
 itants in 1876 to a population of a million to- 
 day, and Sao Paulo from fifteen or t venty-five 
 thousand souls at the utmost to more than half 
 a million. The Northern and Southern Presby- 
 terians, constituting to-day a united Brazilian 
 Presbyterianism, and the Baptists have each 
 grown to about twelve thousand members. 
 The Board of Missions of the Methodist Episco- 
 pal Church later transferred their work in Rio 
 Grande, including realty, to the Southern Meth- 
 odists; so that the Methodist Episcopal Church, 
 South, to-day covers seven States of the re- 
 public with a chain of churches, two An- 
 nual Conferences of Methodists, approximately 
 eight thousand. Several thousand Protestants 
 belong to the William Taylor Mission of the 
 Northern Methodists, to the English and Ameri- 
 can Episcopalians,* to the Independents and 
 fragments broken off from the larger bodies; for 
 of course there have been controversies and 
 schisms, as indeed there were in the days of 
 
 ‘"The Church of England has done work in Brazil 
 among the English-speaking residents for many 
 years through the South American Missionary So- 
 ciety of London and under the direction of the 
 Bishop of Falkland Islands ; while the Protestant 
 Episcopalians of the United States have erected 
 their mission into a missionary diocese (about 
 1898), under direction of Bishop Kinsolving, for- 
 merly of Philadelphia. 
 
 1 5 J 
 
the apostles cf our Lord. There should be 
 not less than fifty thousand Lutherans to cor- 
 respond to the many Protestant Germans who 
 have settled under special inducements, partic- 
 ularly in the more temperate regions of South- 
 ern Brazil, Santa Catharina, Parana, and Rio 
 Grande do Sul, as well as in the inland moun- 
 tain plateau of Minas Geraes and Sao Paulo; 
 but nobody seems to know much of these 
 German Protestants, who thus far have been 
 almost altogether conservative instead of an 
 aggressive missionary element in the religious 
 life of Brazil. 
 
 The Southern Methodists of Brazil, approx- 
 imately eight thousand in number, are distrib- 
 uted somewhat as follows: In Rio de Janeiro, 
 the city. State, and Federal District, in round 
 numbers, eight hundred members; in Rio 
 Grande do Sul, fifteen hundred; in Minas 
 Geraes, twenty-three hundred; and in the State 
 of Sao Paulo, twenty-four hundred, with smaller 
 fractions elsewhere to make up the total. Dur- 
 ing the period of ten years just ended the 
 Methodists of Rio Grande do Sul contributed 
 for all purposes $51,000; Rio de Janeiro, the 
 city, Federal District, and the State, $70,000; 
 Minas Geraes, $86,000; and Sao Paulo, city and 
 State, $123,000. 
 
 We began work in Sao Paulo (city) thirty 
 years ago and have there three organized 
 Churches, one of them Italian, the three ag- 
 gregating over five hundred members, or near- 
 ly twenty-one per cent of the membership of 
 the entire State. For church edifices w^e have 
 [ 6 ] 
 
two remodeled buildings, of which one houses 
 our Italian congregation, and the other was 
 bought and almost entirely paid for by our 
 Central Church, a Portuguese-speaking congre- 
 gation which worships in it. There is, or was, 
 a small body of Methodists who left us to enter 
 a factional “national” movement, thus uncon- 
 
 CENTRAL CHURCH, SAG PAULO. 
 
 sciously repeating a chapter of Methodist 
 Church history in the America of the days of 
 Bishop Asbury. In the heart of Sao Paulo 
 City our Central Church has driven down its 
 stakes by the purchase of a splendid lot, for 
 which was paid $20,000. Upon this lot it is pro- 
 [ 7 ] 
 
posed to build a great institutional church some 
 day in a not far-distant future. 
 
 In the city of Sao Paulo Protestantism is 
 represented by McKenzie Presbyterian College, 
 of which the late Dr. Lane was for many years 
 President, and in which were educated some 
 of the leading men of the State. When Dr. 
 Lane died, the State Legislature adjourned in 
 token of the great esteem in which he was 
 held. The “Independents” operate a theolog- 
 ical seminary; and the Presbyterians, “Inde- 
 pendents,” Baptists, and Lutherans each op- 
 erate day schools particularly for their own 
 adherents. Methodism has no educational plant 
 in this the second city of the republic, sur- 
 passed in population in all South America only 
 by Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Ayres. Wheth- 
 er a federation of Protestant Churches may 
 not produce in Sao Paulo something more per- 
 manent and representative of the common faith 
 of the Churches than these fragmentary but 
 most estimable schools remains to be seen. 
 However, our Central Church, miserably 
 housed, bought and paid for its own plant and 
 is practically supporting its own pastor. 
 
 The State of Sao Paulo embraces about one 
 hundred and twelve thousand square miles, 
 with a population of perhaps thirty-one per- 
 sons to the square mile. Its people are enter- 
 prising and thrifty, its territory extends from 
 the narrow border of the coast line up beyond 
 the Serra Da Mantiqueira into a northwestern 
 interior, and is mainly a great upland trop- 
 ical plateau, with an average elevation of from 
 [ 8 ] 
 
a thousand to eighteen hundred feet, a great 
 coffee region, producing rice, Indian corn, and 
 a copious variety of foodstuffs. It has several 
 thousand miles of railway, but its natural re- 
 sources are as yet mainly undeveloped. Its 
 fauna, flora, and mineral wealth is great and 
 abundantly sufficient for the needs of millions 
 of inhabitants. 
 
 Public education in Sao Paulo, State and cap- 
 ital, is far in advance of the average for Brazil, 
 in part due no doubt to the massing there 
 of the efforts of the various Protestant Church- 
 es; but that very advance is a clarion summons 
 to Methodism thoroughly to equip our mission 
 for the great work of evangelization, which has 
 yet only fairly been inaugurated. 
 
 The public edifices of the city of Sao Paulo 
 are planned upon a truly New-World scale of 
 magnificence. The sleepy Roman Catholicism 
 of former years has arrayed itself in modern 
 finery and near our vacant Methodist Church 
 lot has begun to crystallize its dream of organ- 
 ized worship and spiritual domination in the 
 form of a huge and tremendously costly half- 
 modernized cathedral. In sight of that impos- 
 ing splendor of Roman Catholicism it is not 
 hard for passers-by, beholding the unusual op- 
 portunity of Methodism, to read the modern 
 version of our Lord’s parable: “This Church 
 prepared to build, and has not been able to 
 finish.” Fifty thousand dollars from the home 
 Church and twenty-five thousand from the 
 brave little Central Church, and we would have 
 a modern Methodist church building, radically 
 [ 9 ] 
 
different in design and purpose from the grand 
 cathedral, massive enough and wonderfully ef- 
 ficient for our purpose of spreading Christian 
 holiness over the Land of the Southern Cross. 
 Our work began in the State of Sao Paulo as a 
 mission in 1875-76 under the impression that 
 rural methods were all that were needed in 
 
 ANOTHER VIEW OF CENTRAL CHURCH. SAO PAULO. 
 
 evangelizing Brazil. The city of Sao Paulo has 
 increased its area, its population is more than 
 twenty fold as great as thirty years ago, and 
 its social and racial problems are a hundred- 
 fold more complex; but we are still using prac- 
 tically the outgrown methods of that earlier 
 [ 10 ] 
 
day. The Church of to-day in the homeland 
 prepares to handle the modern Sunday school, 
 the Epworth League, the missionary societies, 
 the social life of the Church — in short, properly 
 to house the great congregation. We need in 
 part the deaconess, the social worker, the li- 
 brary, the Bible reader, the Christian nurse, 
 the kindergartner. Sao Paulo is a modern 
 city; its railroads, trolley lines, manufactories, 
 telephones, and what not by way of modern 
 devices for comfort and efficiency are of the 
 twentieth century. Its elegance, comfort, and 
 wealth, along with its efficient men and wom- 
 en in lower life, must be won for Christ. It 
 is worth while to put lives and money and 
 faith and effort into such a campaign. We 
 must win in such a vital endeavor as this or 
 recognize the ultimate failure and decay of our 
 lesser enterprises. God has given our Church 
 the men and women here and in Brazil who 
 are needed for such a task, and God has given 
 the Church the money needed for such an outlay. 
 Will Southern Methodism respond to a need 
 like this? The second President of the Bra- 
 zilian republic was our personal friend; his 
 beautiful daughter was educated at Collegio 
 Piracicabano. He never wavered in his friend- 
 ship, but he stood firm in his rationalism that 
 he learned before he knew us. In this great 
 city of Sao Paulo, in the splendid scientific 
 school that is preparing the future masters of 
 Brazil for the work of practical life, we are 
 represented by a comparatively young man who 
 came into our Church in early life. We need 
 [ 11 ] 
 
to equip our point of vantage with a becoming 
 edifice, where competent men shall preach a 
 manly gospel of such power as shall win to 
 Christ the men and women who are to give 
 character to the next hundred years of Brazilian 
 history. We need fifty thousand dollars to 
 breathe life into a splendid enterprise and 
 bring to realization a scheme, a dream, a divine 
 vision of equipment for the multiform work of 
 Christ. Such a monument of the faith and 
 hope, the spiritual aspiration of our day and 
 time, will be for some generations to come the 
 material expression in stone and mortar, in 
 concrete and structural steel, of our experience 
 of the manifold grace of the Son of God. 
 
 RAILWAY STATION AT SAO PAULO, BRAZIL. 
 
 [12 1