He took the book “The Kingdom Is at Hand” in English and I told him I would call back later. Then I started a study with him and he accepted the truth. Later he asked to have the study in Spanish because he realized he was to have a part in the preaching work and would have to improve his Spanish and learn how to read Spanish. Soon he was with us in field service and was baptized. On Sunday he and I would work together, he taking me to some of his backcalls, and we started three studies. One day on our way to one of these he said: “I pray to God that I will find a sheep out here in this territory.”

One Italian with whom we had just started a study took hold of the truth very rapidly and soon was in the service with us. This Italian then started to pioneer in spite of the fact that he has a wife and three children to support. He continues doing very well.

After a series of lectures we started a service center in one of the homes and later that study was turned over to a mature brother living nearby. Now we have a congregation of seventy publishers in this suburb. Last month when the circuit servant gave a public talk in that congregation eighty-one attended.

Last June I had been in Venezuela for eleven years. It seems as if I have been here most of my life, at least the most important part of it. During those years things have changed much in this country. Its capital, Caracas, now with a million people, has been changed into a modern city with new buildings and new streets.

In Venezuela the number of Kingdom publishers also has increased year by year. With an average of thirteen in 1946, it now exceeds 1,233. For last year the peak number of publishers was 1,364. We have eight missionary homes and twenty-two congregations in the country. The message and the work have spread to the far corners of this land. Here in Caracas we started with four publishers and now we have five units with over 550. Throughout the country the publishers work hard and we always have an average of twelve hours or more per publisher. Still we need more pioneers and missionaries, having much territory to cover.

So while pursuing my purpose in life I have learned that it is a great privilege and blessing to be a missionary in a foreign field. Looking back, I am very thankful to Jehovah that I started to pioneer when I did and that I accepted the invitation to Gilead. Pioneer work, followed by Gilead training and missionary service, is not to be compared with anything in this old world. The joy and the privileges of serving entirely outweigh hardships and inconveniences you encounter along the way. I have fifteen years in full-time service, with most of that time in the foreign field. I would not trade my experience with anybody. Were I again a youth of seventeen I would have my heart and mind set on Gilead and missionary service.

The Treatment of Heretics

Thomas Aquinas, who lived during the thirteenth century, is the celebrated philosopher of the Roman Catholic Church. Interestingly, even to this day his Summa Theologiae remains substantially the standard Roman Catholic authority. In discussing the treatment of heretics, he says in Question XI, Art. 3, 2 a, 2ae: “It is much more serious to corrupt faith, which gives life to the soul, than to falsify money, which sustains temporal life. If, therefore, the falsifiers of money or other malefactors are at once by secular princes justly given up to death, how much more may heretics, as soon as they are convicted of their heresy, be not only excommunicated, but justly killed.”