things else were present, they must remain unblessed till Christ has come to redeem them from death and to lift them into his likeness and glory. Though all the features of our Western civilization were to replace the arts and customs that now prevail in these lands, if you have not first brought the healing of Christ's touch to their palsied hearts, you have not increased their blessings or set them in the paths of peace.

Study the problem in Africa, where a totally different phase of heathenism presents itself. How shall these rude, unlettered tribes escape from their barbarism, shake off their earthly fetters, lift themselves up to the thoughts and manners of a worthy social and national life? What does Africa need most of all to lead her out of her barren, unstoried, unprogressive past into the paths which Europe entered a millenium since, and along which she now marches, the leader and inspirer of the modern world? Plainly she needs training and development of all kinds and degrees, and varied contact with the civilized nations. This goes without saying. But this is not all; it is not even the principal thing. Obviously the deepest and greatest need of Africa's millions is the knowledge and worship of the true God, the divine touch and healing of Christ's great salvation. That will make men and patriots, scholars and gentlemen, of these savages; that will make cities and states and great nations of these rude tribes; that will fill the continent with happy life and with high thoughts, with the stir of peaceful industries, with song, and manful speech, and the voice of praise, as Europe and its air have been full and vocal with the noblest human life through many centuries. The greatest weakness of Africa and the heaviest clog to her growth is the same that we find in India and China. It is a lost world groping in darkness and sin, and sinking down in despair. Steam and electricity, the Western sciences and arts do not hold the secret of her future. Christ is the Redeemer of Africa as of every human soul, and his is the only voice that can break her slumbers, his the only hand that can lift her up and make her stand. Let European colonies and trading-posts spring up along every river, in every valley, at every port; send steamships far inland on river and lake; build railways from the desert to the cape, from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean; connect every tribe and kraal by telegraph with Paris and London and New York, and if Christ has not gone before you to call African manhood to life, you have brought no real and permanent blessing to that dark land. Dead lies the continent, as the son of the widow of Nain on his bier, and for her there is nothing but continued death and silence, till Christ shall come and lay his hand upon the dead and bid her live forevermore.

In civilized and in barbarous lands, in the Orient, in the mysteries of the "Dark Continent," in the wastes of the Pacific, the unevangelized world presents this one common aspect of moral ruin and exposure to everlasting death to stir our compassions and awaken our love. Beneath all differences, in spite of all diversities, these hundreds of millions of souls alike lie in bondage and condemnation because of sin; they groan and sigh, they live in darkness and die without hope; they grovel in iniquity, they revel in cruelty, they sink down in despair. A strong man armed guards the citadel of every heathen nation and of every unregenerate soul, and until a stronger than he shall come to take away his arms and deliver his captives, their thraldom and woe remain.

II. What has the Christian Church to give to the unevangelized nations? This is our second inquiry.

There is a certain self-satisfied pride which leads us to think that these people need everything that we can give them. But a wiser thought corrects this view. God has appointed to every nation the bounds of its habitation and the measure of its service, and he has not fitted all people to render the same service or to run the same career. European life has received a distinct contribution from each of the principal nations, and is the richer for these varied gifts. England has not furnished all, France has not served alone, Germany has brought her own peculiar share. And this is evidently the divine order.

The non-christian world does not need everything that is peculiar to us, but that one thing which is the root and spring of the best human life in the earth. What Paul had to give to the cultured Athenians, what Augustine had to give to the savage English, that we have to give to the cultured East and to the barbarous South. Not our civilization and manners, but the root and prolific seed of the best civilization and manners which they can win; not our forms of life, but that Christian faith which has inspired our growth and guided our steps and led us up to the place of privilege and power we now possess. These nations will take on their own civilization when their time shall come; and if it is grounded in Christian sentiment, it will be a new and glorious fruit, a positive contribution to the wealth of the world, even though it differ at many points from ours.

Were it possible for us to impart our science, our industries, our social customs, our schools and press and railroads and telegraphs, and to induce China and India to adopt them all, if this went first, and if this were all, the work would be worse than in vain. For these are not our best gifts or chief glory. If these nations had everything of this kind which we possess and still clung to their false faiths, their people would not be blessed, their homes would not smile with peace, their life would not lay hold on great objects and lift itself up to the full stature of a true manhood. Their peerless culture and art and political genius did not save ancient Greece or Rome; these things are not the secret of our strength or the nourishing heart of our civilization; they have no power to save lost men or the lost nations to-day.

It is a new spiritual life that is needed, the new man in Christ Jesus, out of which shall at length arise the new heavens and the new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness. Let that glorious reality lay hold on the men and women of Africa and India and China, and the grace of God in Jesus Christ become incarnate in a thousand cities and in countless homes, and the end for which we toil and pray and wait will come as surely as the day succeeds the night. Not an Americanized China and Japan, not an India or Africa wearing the livery of European life; but a Christianized China, a regenerated Japan, freely assuming their proper powers and qualities in the civilization of the world and yielding the rich harvests of everlasting life; an Africa rising from her dark thraldom in the name of the Lord and putting on the robes of her beauty and the armor of her strength in forms and degrees all her own, and pouring her rich tribute into the treasury of heaven. What the Chinese Christian civilization will be, no man can yet tell; something new in the earth, rich, expansive, enduring; in coming time and for the Oriental world, the peer of all that England has been to the West for a thousand years. The life and manners, the institutions and literature that shall flourish in Christian Africa lie beyond conjecture; but in their time and place doubtless they will prove to the full as sweet and noble, as free and full of light, as those which Europe boasts: a new, consummate fruit of time to the praise of God and the joy of the whole earth. And both will be glorious chiefly because from them the courts of heaven are filling with the world's one treasure — redeemed human souls.

This is all very familiar, and yet it needs to be repeated and understood and heartily believed by every generation of the Church, lest unconsciously the original and divine aim of our foreign missionary cause slip out of mind, and our thoughts be turned to some inferior or impossible task. We do not attempt to do everything desirable for those to whom we minister, but that one thing without which nothing else to purpose can be done. The millions in heathen lands, one by one, need salvation from sin - the personal gift of the personal God to every soul that believeth. This is the first need; around this result gathers the interest of God and angels and eternity; and it is to this end, and strictly to this alone, that our Christian effort is to be addressed. It is not for a moment denied that society needs to be reformed, family life to be purified, the state to be rebuilt; Christ's life must ultimately penetrate and fill and re-create the whole

also to be settled during our own generation, and largely by us of this Western Continent, in behalf of Japan, and China, and India, and Turkey, and Africa, and Papal Lands. "Who is sufficient for these things?"

It seems to your Committee appropriate to call the attention of this Board, at its present meeting, to a topic the consideration of which is specially fitted for the locality where we meet; the interdependence of these two great interests, the work at home and the work abroad, and to the fact that they stand or fall together.

THE FOREIGN MISSIONARY PURPOSE.

Let us endeavor first to form a clear conception of what we mean by the distinctively foreign missionary purpose, noting how it necessarily leads to the most vigorous prosecution of the work at home.

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The foreign missionary purpose is the definite aim to carry the riches of the gospel of Christ as speedily as possible, to the utmost of our personal ability, to every unevangelized people on the face of the earth. It emphasizes the claims of the human race as such, in relation to which it is written: God . . . hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation, that they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him and find him, though he be not far from every one of us" — all its millions everywhere as they reach the period of personal accountability-alike responsible, according to their measure of opportunity, to the same God; alike guilty and ill-deserving; alike summoned to repentance; alike recipients, to some degree, of divine grace; alike called upon to accept that grace and be saved. It emphasizes the claims of the most needy those who have received the least of that lightwhich lighteth every man that cometh into the world," and who are most imminently exposed to sink down into everlasting night. It holds the thoughts to the vast multitudes of these unevangelized peoples-the overwhelming majority of the human family, counted by hundreds of millions; the long, long procession moving on swiftly and surely under the self-imposed bondage of their own lusts, vices, superstitions, idolatries, and criminalities,1 toward what is termed by the apostle 2 "the righteous judgment of God, . . . who will render to every man according to his deeds, . . . to the Jew first and also to the Gentile." The conception well-nigh overpowers, as it was meant to do, the compassionate Christian heart, bowing down the disciple, as it bowed down the Master before him, in anguish of spirit — an anguish relieved only as the Master himself was relieved, by the exercise of the constraining love which lifts and sustains.

It emphasizes at the same time the specific divine command, to which it seeks to render a loyal personal obedience, going whithersoever the Master's voice calls. It recognizes also the urgency of the command and the urgency of the need, in that the opportunity is brief both for him who carries the message and for those to whom it is borne. Whatever others have done or have failed to do before us; whatever others may do or may fail to do after us, upon ourselves during our own brief day rests, according to our measure of ability, the serious obligation to evangelize the living men and women of our own generation at this hour passing through their one probation, to each of them as momentous as to each of us; for whose present and final well-being, as far as it depends upon that gospel of Jesus Christ which has been committed to us in their behalf, we, the dwellers in Christian lands, are to-day responsible.

This is the burning, controlling thought of the genuine foreign missionary spirit. No wonder it has sent and is sending hundreds of devoted men and women away from the thousands, however needy, of lands nominally Christian, to the more needy mill

1 Compare Romans i, 21-32.

2 Romans ii, 6-10.

ions of lands positively heathen. No wonder that gifts and prayers from those who cannot personally go pour themselves out in lavish measure from tens of thousands of grateful hearts. The wonder is that the number of messengers, gifts, and prayers are not all multiplied a hundredfold, with a fervor of consecration a hundred times more intense.

FOREIGN MISSIONS HELPING HOME.

This very statement of what the distinctively foreign missionary spirit is indicates how vitally it enters into every department of Christian work at home. Since there are multitudes, as already suggested, who are necessarily prevented from becoming personal messengers, who may nevertheless be as completely filled with the same burning zeal as those who go, this flame of burning zeal must express itself in every conceivable form of Christian activity for the salvation of every man, woman, and child accessible all around us at our own doors. There is no form of human need at home, which would not be thoroughly supplied, simply as a supplementary "twelve baskets full," to the well-equipped resolute endeavor first of all to feed the hungering millions of heathen lands. Let the Lord's people, filled with their Lord's compassionate spirit, heartily unite in the determined purpose, as the primary obligation in obedience to their Lord's "marching orders," to carry the message as rapidly as possible to those who are farthest from the light and deepest in the degradation, and the whole Christian world would be flooded with celestial glory, the power of the divine Spirit would come down in amplest measure, the masses of men here at home whom, as we sometimes lament, we now fail to reach, would themselves spring forward, eager both to receive and communicate the heavenly gift, while at the same time the millions of the heathen world would begin to hasten from every direction to welcome the swiftly approaching messengers.

If there be any one instrumentality which the representatives of the home missionary work in its various departments should press upon their home constituency as most vital for the immediate urgency of the homework, it is an entire personal surrender of every Christian heart to the distinctive, unselfish, self-sacrificing purpose of contributing every energy of mind and body to the proclamation of Christ by ten thousand heralds running to meet the immediate urgency of the perishing millions of unevangelized lands.

THE HOME MISSIONARY PURPOSE.

But it will be asked: Is there not also a distinctively home missionary idea which has its serious responsibility and its commanding power? Most certainly there is; and upon its development in an intense form the entire evangelistic work abroad is absolutely dependent. Of this important fact let us now take note.

The distinctively home missionary purpose recognizes the gravity of a special trust committed to us by God to care for those particularly dependent upon us in our own households, our own neighborhood, our own town or city, and, on a broader scale, our own commonwealth and our own beloved land. It has its favorite scriptural mottoes: "If any provide not for his own, and especially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith and is worse than an infidel;""For I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh;" Repentance and remission of sins should be preached in his name among all nations, begin

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ning," as expressed in King James's familiar version, "at Jerusalem; "If I forget

This is the noblest form of

It emphasizes the enter

thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning." patriotism thoroughly pervaded with the spirit of Christ. prise, the heroism, the patience, the far-seeing wisdom of those who planted upon these Western shores the institutions of civil and religious liberty and who were willing to be themselves the "stepping-stones" over which others should walk who should build the statelier structures of the future. It remembers at what a costly price has

been purchased and retained the heritage in which we to-day rejoice, and it honors the men who cheerfully paid the price; bearing the good tidings along the opening path through the forests and beyond the lakes and the rivers, preëmpting the territory for Christ; founding Christian states; kneeling down upon the bare ground, sometimes upon the wintry snow, and consecrating the future sites of Christian colleges and seminaries which were predestined to educate missionaries not only for the yet newer Territories and States farther on toward the setting sun even to the Pacific Sea, but also in due time to the newborn Land of the Rising Sun beyond the sea. This is the spirit which magnifies, as it ought, the peculiar claims of dependent races committed here to the more highly-favored, taking upon the heart the red man of the forest, the freedman of the South, and the mingling peoples of other lands — European and Asiatic, these latter gravitating resistlessly, whether we will or not, toward this central land of promise - all suggesting the momentous question: How are all these races to be thoroughly Christianized and saved? With this question the home missionary spirit vigorously wrestles, with all the subordinate questions included: the grave problems of the hourcivil, social, political, economic, and educational; the relations of capital and labor; the methods of reaching and evangelizing the masses of our great cities; the perils from intemperance, from communism, from Mormonism. It enlarges into Collegiate and Education Societies, into Church-Building Societies, into New West Commissions. It branches out into more approved methods of Sunday-school work, into normal Biblical training, into Societies of Christian Endeavor, into more systematic and efficient plans for evangelistic effort. It keeps planting new educational institutions, while broadening and strengthening those already established. It is fertile in ingenious expedients and wise experiments, all the time with clear discernment and courageous purpose pushing on in one direction; namely, the thorough Christianization of our own beloved land which, historically and providentially, as we fully believe, is leading the nations of the earth.

Here we are by divine appointment upon this Western Continent at this critical hour in the world's history, either to maintain our standing-place, — Christian “Liberty enlightening the world," — to broaden and deepen our power, and to move on to our grander future, or we are to weaken and disintegrate; grow narrow, selfish, and selfindulgent - godless and accursed at length; to go down into a night which shall darken the world for centuries. As to which destiny shall be ours the home missionary idea has a clear conviction wrought into a resolute purpose, ever emphasizing its ringing motto: "As goes America, so goes the world." This is a most inspiriting idea and one upon which, rightly interpreted, the foreign missionary work is more dependent for its wisest and most permanent results than upon any other. And this for two

reasons:

HOME MISSIONS HELPING FOREIGN.

1. The foreign missionary work, as soon as it is established abroad, becomes in the most literal sense home missions and therefore looks to the development of the work in our own land largely for its inspiration and guidance.

The problem in Japan to-day is this: How shall Japanese Christians be trained to accept the responsibility of their own institutions, sustain them, enlarge them, and so thoroughly develop their own self-supporting and aggressive home missionary work that they shall also develop a foreign missionary work for less favored people than themselves? There is a similar problem to be solved by the Armenians and Greeks of Turkey, by the Maratha people and the Tamil people of India and Ceylon, by the Zulus of Southern Africa, by the Bohemians of Austria, by the dwellers in old Castile and Aragon in Spain, and by the islanders of the Pacific. This is one of our most perplexing foreign missionary problems; namely, how to guard against too large pecuniary grants-in-aid, which shall foster a prolonged dependence upon foreign money and