/2-.i~. /S, **^^ PRINCETON, N. J. ^ Purchased by the Hamill Missionary Fund. BY 2085 .S8 1900 Storrs, Richard S. 1821- 1900. Addresses on foreign missions delivered before ADDRESSES ON FOREIGN MISSIONS DELIVERED BEFORE THE American Board of Commissioners FOR Foreign Missions RICHARD S. STORRS, D.D., LL.D. PRESIDENT OF THE BOARD 1887—1897 ^Bablt'slielr tig tfje amettcan ISoarU of fi^omtntssiontrs for iForeign fHisstons CONGREGATIONAL HOUSE. BOSTON 1900 Press of Samuel Usher, Boston, Mass. PREFATORY NOTE. The following addresses, excepting the last, were delivered at suc- cessive Annual Meetings of the American Board, by Dr. R. S. Storrs, President of the Board from 1887 to 1897. The last one in the series was delivered by him, in answer to special request, at the concluding session of the International Congregational Council in Boston, in September, 1899. In this latter service he took the place, for the occasion, of Dr. C. M. Lamson, who had succeeded him in the Presi- dency of the Board, but who had passed out of earthly life in the previous summer; and his particular theme was the one which had been selected by Dr. Lamson for himself, in anticipation of that im- portant meeting. It has seemed, therefore, altogether appropriate to add this address to the others which had preceded. None of the addresses had been written beforehand, and they were accordingly preserved only by the skill and diligence of reporters. Where special arrangements for such had been made — as at Cleve- land, Minneapolis, Chicago, and elsewhere — the reports were com- monly accurate and complete. Where, for any reason, the reports had been left to be made by representatives of the secular press, they were commonly found to be incorrect in important particulars, or abridged and partial, as at Pittsfield. In one instance, of the address at Madi- son in 1894, while certain leading lines of thought had been repro- duced, the report as a whole was so unsatisfactory that no effort was made to revise and complete it, and hence it is not included in this collection. The controlling theme in all the addresses was, of course, the same — the duty and privilege of foreign missionary work ; but it was the desire of the speaker, as was uniformly noticed, to present this theme 4 PREFATORY NOTE. under such different aspects, and in such various relations, as might seem appropriate to the several communities in which the meetings were held, and to any special conditions there at the time appearing. So many requests have been made to the officers of the Board by those interested in its work for the publication of this series of ad- dresses, of which only three have been printed in pamphlet form, that, with the consent of Dr. Storrs, they are now brought together in the present form — in the hope that, with God's blessing, they may quicken and widen interest in the great cause which they were designed to serve. It is confidently believed that the powerful impressions produced when these addresses were first delivered, at a critical period in the history of the Board, will be revived in many who heard them, and that others now and in coming years will read them with profit and delight, as among the best specimens of sacred eloquence employed upon the noblest of themes. Rooms of the American Board, Boston, April, 1900. TABLE OF CONTENTS. PAGB I. Why Christians Gather for Foreign Missions. Cleve- land, 1888 9 Concluding Address at Cleveland 21 II. Relations of Foreign Missions and Commerce. New York, 1889 33 Concluding Address at New York 46 III. The Opportunity of the West in Foreign Missions. Minneapolis, 1890 53 Concluding Address at Minneapolis 69 IV, The Vision of Christ the Inspiration- to Foreign Mis- sions. PiTTSFIELD, 1 89 1 75 ' V. Our Country's Tribute to the World's Civilization. Chicago, 1892 85 VI. The Appeal of Foreign Missions to Business Communities. Worcester, 1893 103 VII. The Aim of Foreign Missions. Brooklyn, 1895 . . . 121 VIII. Incentives to Missionary Work. Toledo, 1896 . . .139 IX. Foundation Truths of American Missions. New Haven, 1897 IS7 X. The Permanent Motive in Missionary Work. Interna- tional Congregational Council, Boston, 1899 . . 173 I. m^V C]^rt0tian0 (Batten Cor ifforefgn ADDRESS AT THE ANNUAL MEETING AT CLEVELAND, 1888. WITH CONCLUDING ADDRESS. WHY CHRISTIANS GATHER FOR FOREIGN MISSIONS. Fathers and Brethren, and Christian Friends : I do not think that any one, not of his blood, can miss this evening the reverend and benignant face of him who so long presided over this Board more keenly than I do. It has been my happiness, not infrequently, to speak upon the platform of the Board, but always, when I have done so hitherto, I have been introduced by him ; and I feel, while standing here this evening, somewhat as one might when treading a high path with the hand of a leader and a friend suddenly with- drawn. But I know that so much of his spirit has gone into the Board, and into those who are its friends, that you will hear me with readiness, and with a welcome like that which you have already expressed. I have another sense of diffidence in saying anything this even- ing, because I speak after these veteran missionaries, who have returned from their fields of labor and of struggle, and who have come to give us their impressions of the fields in which they have worked, and of the vast importance of these to the kingdom of God on the earth. In the old times of the war, you know, we used to rejoice to hear the story of a soldier, of an oflScer, returned from the field, rather than to hear the discourse of any man con- cerning the war who had not himself had a part in it ; and I have something of that feeling this evening, and would far rather sit and listen to those who bring us tidings from afar than to say anything myself, if the custom and propriety of the occasion did not demand that I should. And then I have still a third feeling in the same direction : that this meeting itself, this great assembly of the Board and of its friends, is the real speaker on this occasion ; and that any single voice is insignificant in comparison with the appeal lO PV^V CHRISTIANS GATHER which the vast assemblage makes to all our minds, to all our hearts. I believe it is Schiller who says that " if you compact the thunder into one quick peal, the royal sound will shake the earth ; but if you distribute the thunder into single and separated tones, those tones become a lullaby for children." So I feel that the voice, inarticulate though it be, of this assembly, is the real speaker on this occasion. But, as I have been sitting here in this day or two of work and of responsibility, yet with intervals of thought, I have asked myself the question, again and again. Why are we here .? And it is to that question that I propose to give, in some brief measure, an answer. The land around us is echoing at this moment with a vast pro- longed political debate ; processions are marching along the streets, with banners and torches ; great assemblies are gathered to hear the words of eloquent speakers ; the columns of the news- papers are filled with paragraphs resonant and impelling, and all men are called to choose their sides, and to take their part in the great work in which the nation is now engaged. It is right and reasonable that this should be so. This great debate is educating as well as animating — educating the citizens, on whom it calls to perform the highest function which is committed to them. We may be in sympathy with one party, or another party, or a third party, but we are all in sympathy with the patriotic impulse which underlies the immense and significant movement. Now, we are gathered here, not primarily by any patriotic im- pulse, though that has its part in our assembly, since whatever great work a nation undertakes greatens the nation ; whatever magnificent enterprise the church of Christ enters upon and carries on, gives new power to that church ; and the church in this coun- try is to have its power for subduing the country to Christ by the mighty effort which it makes to conquer the world for the Master ; so that it is in that sense a patriotic impulse which brings us hither. But that is not the primary thing. Nor do we come here in fealty to an organization. Much as we value, highly as we honor, deeply as we venerate this American Board, which antedated the life of almost every one present, and which has wrought such illustrious work in the past, it is not merely in loyalty to that that we are here FOR FOREIGN MISSIONS. I I assembled, as men may be gathered by their fidelity to the Repub- lican organization, or the Democratic, or that of the Prohibition party ; or as the Roman Catholic missions are, to a certain extent, inspired and animated by the devotion of those who take part in them to the great Roman Catholic organization which they repre- sent. No ! Our aims are ampler and remoter. Why, then, are we here? We are here, first, because of our sympathy with men of every race, of every religion, and every color, and every clime, and every form of social organization. We desire to benefit them whereso- ever we can reach them \ and that is the spirit of the Master, who came not to be ministered unto but to minister ; who made the power of miracle, which was lodged in his will and regnant on his hands, mighty for the relief of the suffering, the uplifting of the lowly, and the comforting of the sad. That is the Christian spirit. "Ich dien" (I serve) is the legend on the crest of every prince in the royal house of God. It was in that spirit that missions originated ; it is in that spirit that they have been carried on ; it is in that spirit that they will continue to be carried on, to the end of time. We do not propose merely to seek, either, the spiritual welfare of men, but to seek to advance their material and physical interests as well, by the preaching of the gospel, which is for the life that now is as well as for that which is to come. Not a great while ago, I heard a lady who was returning fi-om voyaging around the world, a lady not interested in mission work, say, " Whenever I attended church at home I was called upon, very frequently certainly, if not always, to contribute to missionary work, and I gave, sometimes more and sometimes less; but I thought, when I got out of America, I had escaped such appeals. I landed in the Sandwich Islands. I went to a church in Honolulu, and the first sermon I heard was a missionary sermon, and the first serv^ice in which I was called to take part was to assist a col- lection for proclaiming the gospel to people in Africa." Said she, " I believe I am never going to get rid of this thing ! " There is an old Indian legend, I believe, that a poor man threw a bud of charity into Buddha's bowl, and it blossomed into a thousand flowers. Now, we throw out the bud of Christian truth, by the 12 WHY CHRISTIANS GATHER Gospel, into scattered communities here and there throughout the earth, and it bursts into a thousand fragrant blossoms. We are contemplating, as I said, not merely the spiritual welfare of men, though that chiefly, but also their present advancement and wel- fare in the world ; for there is nothing like the power of the gospel to lift nations into the light and peace, and the glorious hope, which come with liberty. There is nothing like that to give men spur and expectation for the life on the earth, as well as for that in the coming Immortality. Men say sometimes that right religious thought is connected undoubtedly with right religious emotion, but with nothing else. There never was a greater mistake made by any intelligent person. Right religious thought has to do with all life — with the entire conduct and prosperity of our affairs in the world. It is spoken of as being the "water of life " ; and it is like the water, which is in the breath of the babe and in the bone of the man, which is in the dewdrop, which is in the mill stream, which is in the fleecy cloud, which is in the boiler of the engine, which is in the rainbow that lifts its shining arch above us, and in the cataract whose tre- mendous rush and precipitous fall go on underneath that lovely and lustrous arch. I have sometimes thought, in the universality of its application, that it was like the paper which men make out of defiled and rotting rags, — one of the miracles of modern industry ; on which are impressed the great truths of the Bible, yes ! on which are impressed the great thoughts of preachers and teachers, yes ! but on which also the lady writes her note, and the poet writes his lays, and the author writes his essays or treatises, and the merchant writes his accounts, and on which nations conduct their corre- spondence, — which enters as a material into almost a hundred and fifty mechanical arts ; of which the roofs and walls of houses are sometimes builded, which is fabricated into toys for the hand of childhood, and which is wedged and rammed and moulded into the car-wheel, on which flows back and forth, with incessant and resounding recurrence, the commerce of a continent. So it is with religious thought. It has to do with every part of life ; and it has to do, especially, with peoples in whom the spirit of enter- prise and hope is re-arising. FOR FOREIGN MISSIONS. 13 I was very much struck, not a great while ago, with the pro- found remark of an English civilian, statesman, thinker, personally resident in India and familiar with it, to whom reference was made by Secretary Clark a day or two since : to the effect that Brah- minism and Buddhism were rehgions that sprang up in centuries of extreme depression, and were essentially, therefore, religions of despair. They undertook to give an answer to the question, " Is life worth living? " and the answer was " No ! the only superlative good of man is the extinction of personal consciousness." Now, that there stirs a new spirit in India, in China, and in Japan, the old religions drop away from the aspiring and expectant men and women, as a tainted garment drops off from the frame resuming health and vigor ; and Christianity, which is a religion of impulse, of hope, of aspiration, crowned with celestial promises, comes in to meet this new temper of enterprise, and to build better things in all the future, in all these lands. We work for the life that now is, as well as for that which is to come. Above all things else, we work for the conversion to God by a living faith ; for the union with Christ by the work of the Holy Spirit in the hearts of those to whom we carry the message of divine love ; that they may be set as stars in the firmament on high ; that they may join with angels and saints in the praises and the glories of the life everlasting. It is this impulse which brings us together : sympathy with men, a desire to bless them, and then enthusiasm for the truth — enthusiasm for the truth because of its own glory, and not merely because of the effects it works on those who receive it. We are not alone in feeling such enthusiasm for truth. The philosopher feels it, the scientific man feels it, the artist feels it — toward the principles which are primordial and "sovereign in the department of art. But we feel it the more, because the truth toward which our minds go out is the supreme truth of the uni- verse, which God himself (reverently be it said) became an author to reveal to us : which comes to us by the hands of apostles from the Master himself : which illuminates all other truth, which enriches and enforces every soul into which it enters. Men who do not believe much, who are of a pyrrhonic or agnostic tendency, will sneer at this earnestness, very likely, and call it bigotry. They H IVI/Y CHRISTIANS GATHER did that in the ante-Nicene times, and they have done it ever since. The difference between homo-ousion and homoi-ousion is to them a mere matter of breath, not worth a thought. The filioque which rent Christendom asunder, which divided the Greek and Roman churches, and has kept them asunder for centuries, seems a fanciful phrase, or a phrase of fanatical frenzy, to a great multitude of people ; who are about as careless or ignorant of the truth as the young lady was of botany, when she was called upon — in a civil service examination, perhaps — to tell something about botany. Well, she said, she really did not know very much about it ; she had studied it once, a good many years ago, but she had forgotten almost all ; she did not know that she could quite tell the difference between a cryptogram and a pachyderm. [Laughter.] Now, if we do not know the difference between the truth and something which is not truth, we shall not enter into this enthusiasm for the work of missions. But our fathers felt it, when they left the English Church, with its ancient and magnificent universities, with delightful parish churches and manses, and came to these wilderness shores because the truth compelled them. They felt it afterwards, in the time of the Unitarian division and debate. We feel it whensoever we think of the truth as it really is, opening to us the secrets of the universe, revealing the moral law to which all physical laws are only the temporary platform, showing to us the redemption, and the great white throne, with the eternal heavens beyond ! We feel the glory of the truth for its own sake, and because God, with the infinite enthusiasm of his divine mind, has communicated it to us ; and we shall feel it more and more if a rampant infidelity is to invade our platforms widely, and to crowd our halls with those who have come to hear something new and startling, staggering even to the moral nature. I have sometimes thought there was a providential reason for permitting infidel speeches to become frequent in a Christian community. It does not harm Christianity. It does not check its advance, any more than the screech of the steam-whistle down here checks the rush of the wave on the lake shore, or would check the tide, if Lake Erie was big enough to have one. [Laughter.] These FOR FOREIGN MISSIONS. 1 5 infidel teachings, like a deadly drug, which, in its reactive effect, makes the Hfe-power in man more complete and more command- ing, may bring out a fresh enthusiasm for the truth in those who believe, who love it, who glory in it, but who have been too much accustomed to take it with a kind of languid acceptance as a matter of course. When this enthusiasm is in us, then we are brought together, of course, by our common desire for common work. Then I say for myself, and I am sure I say it for every thought- ful person in this assembly, I love to be in this work because I love to stand in the ranks, and march in the footsteps, of those who have gone before me in the best work of the world, the work which God most honors, in which he is most pleased, by which he is most praised, and to which he gives the most illustrious promises. Every man Hkes to stand in a grand succession of kindred spirits. The jurist does, the artist does, the scholar does, the professional man in any department does, and the Christian well may. " My soul be with the saints ! " That was the ejaculation of old, and that may be the fervent aspiration of every intelligent and immor- tal spirit now. What a striking fact it is that the positivist calen- dar, the calendar of the disciples of Comte, recognizing no personal God whatever, and no true worship offered to an unseen God, yet gathers apart on its rolls the noble and heroic spirits of the world, blazons them on its books, and sets apart a day for the celebration or commemoration of every one. That shows the depth and power of that instinct in the heart which leads us to wish to stand in the same line with the grand ones who have gone before. We wish to stand there, with Martyn, and Brainerd, and Carey, and Judson, and Ann Hasseltine, and Harriet Newell, and all the others who have given luster to history by their self-consecration to the worjc of the Master. We wish to work with them. Not with them only. We go back to the medieval time, and wish to stand with Boniface, and Adelbert, and Columban, and Anskar, and all the others. We go back to the early apostles, and the Christians who went everywhere, their hearts burning in them, testifying of the Master and of his truth, and of his promise. We wish to be in the line of those who have marched under the golden 1 6 IVJ/V CHRISTIANS GATHER trumpets of God, and under that one banner in the world that never goes down, and to feel that their influence descends upon us. [Applause.] When we feel this power within us we are pulled together, as each particle in the crystal is pulled to every other particle to form the lovely and radiant whole. Then, above all, the sympathy with the Son of God, the love to him, the adoration of him, the desire to glorify him by a work consecrated to him in the world, which is the intensest force of all ! It is most intense, of course, in the time of revival, when our hearts are hot. It is most intense after some experience of sore trial, perhaps, or of long endurance, or of great work from which we shrank, to which he pushed us, and which at last, under his impulse, we resolutely took up. Then we understand the power of that adoring love to Christ ! Women understand it, with their more sensitive emotional and affectionate nature, perhaps, more keenly and mightily than men. The babe in the manger touches the mother's heart ; the scene on the cross speaks to her with a pathos and a power never to be paralleled in the world. The miracle and the mercy, the cradle and the crown, the illustrious ascension, the mediatorial throne of splendor, all come to her, as they are pictured in the New Testament, as they are revealed by the divine Spirit interpreting the New Testament, with a power to lift her above the world, and to make her desirous to live only for Christ. So the Woman's Board comes into existence and activity, and the women go forth to visit their sisters in the harem and the zenana, and to minister the comfort of the gospel in every loneliest cottage, almost in every wildest jungle of the world. Men know it, too. They know it through song and sacrament, through converse with each other, through all the ministry of the church, whose very office and purpose it is to manifest the Son of God for evermore on earth ; and when they see him walking in history, trampling the turbulence of populations into peace, when they see him bringing to pass his vast designs, silently but irresist- ibly, when they think of him on the cross, under which the strong earth shivered, and over which the heavens grew dark, dying for them, and now on the throne of glory in the heavens, with angels and saints praising him in their ceaseless triumph, they feel as FOR FOREIGN MISSIONS. 17 Paul did " when it pleased God," as he said, " to reveal his Son in me." He had revealed his Son to him on the way to Damascus ; afterward he revealed his Son in him, and then, says the apostle, ** I conferred not with flesh or blood ; I was ready for every pil- grimage ; I was ready for every service, at Athens, or Corinth, or Rome ; I was ready for the sword of the empire to liberate my life from its earthly fetters, and set it free in the glory of God's saints." Wheresoever there is that spirit of love and worship, and consecration to the Son of God, there men come together by natural force. The elective affinities of the world pull them into one marshaled mass. And then, beyond even that, is the desire to be in partnership with God, in sympathy with his majestic plans for the conversion of the world and the renewal of the earth to himself. The great reformers have always felt this. Cromwell felt it, and William of Orange, as well as Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin. Our fathers felt it, when they clung to the continent in spite of winds and wolves and winter cold and savage men, knowing, as they said, and as they inscribed it on their statute book, that small colonies are the foundation of great commonwealths. They wished to walk with God, and to work with him in his mighty plan ; and we should be recreant to our ancestors, we should be forgetful of the obligation that comes from a noble and religious descent, if we did not feel the same aspiration, and were not conscious of the same purpose. We should be the meanest of all whom God ever created on earth if, with our faith in him and in his providence, we did not desire to cooperate with him, especially in these times, when he is working so signally and manifestly. Think of his work in the past ! He sent the printing press when he was ready, and the needle of the compass, and the telescope to search the stars. Before that, he had made the Roman Empire bend and break beneath his touch, with all its consolidated strength, the glory of ages. He had taken our savage ancestors, yours and mine, and made them bow before him and accomplish his design ; and when the time came he picked up this continent out of the sea, on the point of the needle, that he might cover it with a purified religion, and make it the throne of that religion in all the earth for all the 1 8 fV//Y CHRISTIANS GATHER centuries. [Applause.] He built our nation into sudden power, beyond the expectation of those who, humanly speaking, were its founders. When the time came he so wiped out slavery with one swift stroke of his red right hand that it shall never appear again. [Applause.] Everything portends the coming of events toward which God's plans have always been working, and toward which now he makes the centuries hurry, and it is our grand privilege to work with him in this vast enterprise for the renewing of the world ; and whensoever we see those august plans, and take part in them with a true enthusiasm of the heart, then we come to- gether ; then we combine our forces with each other, and then, in an armament, not merely as individuals, we go forth with banners flying, and voices triumphant, to speed on the good work for which the ages wait and for which Christ died. And it is very noticeable, in this progress of the divine plan, how powers hostile to the gospel are weakening. Our dear and venerated friend, Dr. Hamlin, gave us illustrations of that in his story this morning of the decadence of Islam. I believe — I will not speak with certainty (he has seen if it is there and I have not) — that over a central door iu the mosque which was the ancient church of Saint Sophia, in Constantinople, there was a magnificent mosaic picture of the Christ, holding the Gospel in one hand and extending the other in benediction, which the Moslems capturing the city covered with paint and with cement ; that there was a tradition among them, which has not died, that whenever that figure of the Christ should reappear the power of the Moslem in Europe would fail and pass ; and that that figure of the Christ, through the scaling of the paint and the mortar, is beginning again to be dimly visible in its mighty and benignant lines. [Applause.] Yes, the weakening of hostile powers, with the ever increasing strength of Christian powers, illustrate the same march of divine providence. And let us remember that the poor and obscure peoples of the world are to be God's chosen instruments in the future toward which the world is tending ! I was very much struck the other day with a remark in the volume, the beautiful and brilliant volume, of a professor in a Western college, with which our Brother Dr. Magoun has long FOR FOREIGN MISSIONS. I 9 been connected, to the effect that of the twelve stones in the foundations of the new Jerusalem of the Apocalypse, which repre- sents the ultimate spiritual and social divine order in the earth, nine are of the commonest material — the quartz, and the alumi- num, which are the common constituent elements in the constitu- tion of the globe. So these poor, obscure, depressed, and almost unknown persons and peoples, as reached by the gospel, purified by the divine Spirit, are to become associated as foundation stones in the grand temple of universal liberty, universal illumination, universal peace, and universal worship. [Applause.] So it is that we are gathered. We are to send the gospel ; to send it, as was suggested in the sermon the other evening, as a seminal germ, to enter into the mind of nations, and to develop itself according to its law, under the conditions and circumstances which are familiar to those nations. We do not care particularly to make Congregationalists out of the Japanese, or out of the China- men, or out of the Hindus. Perhaps they will not become Con- gregationalist, thoroughly, until they have advanced so far on the way to spiritual perfection that our mission to them will have been fulfilled. [Laughter and applause.] Bui we want to send them the gospel, that they may take it in, manifest it in the forms which are to them familiar, and that it may be within them as a power of light and life and glory, lifting them up nearer and nearer to the throne of God. Oh, my Brethren, it is a work magnificent. If there be silence in heaven for the space of half an hour, it must be because angels and saints are watching the on-going of this stupendous work ! It is the work for which Christ shed his blood ; it is the work for which the spirit of God came at Pentecost, and has been abiding with his church from that day to this ; it is the one work certain of success and victory. Yes, Victory; for as surely as the world stands, the plan of God in its redemption shall be carried out, as was his plan in its creation. We take hold of the hand of Omnipotence ; and what shall surpass, what shall exhaust, the courage and the confidence which come from clasp- ing the hand of the Almighty, and feeling the infinite pulses upon our own ? The Christian paradox is to be realized. Let us glory in the thought. The mean things of the world are to subdue the 20 fTiyr CHRISTIANS GATHER FOR FOREIGN MISSIONS. mighty, and the despised things of the world are to overcome the haughty, and the things which are not are to bring to naught the things which are ; and the patient and dying Lamb is to conquer at last the fury and the fierceness of the Lion of the world. [Pro- longed applause.] CONCLUDING ADDRESS AT CLEVELAND. There have been a great many pleasant duties connected with this meeting of the Board, devolving upon me. It is an extremely pleasant duty which comes as the closing one, of expressing to the people of Cleveland, and to the committee of arrangements by which we were invited here, and by which preparations were made for our coming and our entertainment, the thanks of the Board, which have just been incorporated in a resolution, for their kind invitation, and their cordial and universal greeting. Some of us are quite aware, from our own experience in other years, of the amount of care, forethought, solicitude, and direct pecuniary con- tribution, which is involved in the entertainment of the American Board ; and we can only hope that you may find hereafter, as we have found in our experience, a rich reward for all that you have done in connection with this great meeting. It is a good thing to have many Christian friends in all parts of the country, and of the world ; and you of Cleveland will have more to remember you affectionately, and to offer prayer to God on behalf of you and of your churches, in time to come, than you have ever had in the time past. Such prayer will be offered not only in our home con- gregations, but in Africa, and in China, and in India, and in Japan, and in the islands of the sea. There are special reasons, of course, why I should long remem- ber this meeting, closing so pleasantly the first year of my official relations to the Board ; but there are reasons why we all, who have been in attendance here, will remember it with joy and gratitude, as long as we live — for the powerful papers which have been pre- sented by the secretaries of the Board, and by the various commit- tees to whom their reports have been intrusted for examination, for the number and the eloquence of the remarks of the missionaries 22 CONCLUDING ADDRESS AT CLEVELAND. who have been present with us, veterans returned from the front to tell of past successes, and to point out the necessity for further and advancing work. We shall remember the spirit of devoutness which has marked the prayers and the songs that have arisen from this assembly. We shall recall with gladness to God the impulses which have come here into our hearts. We shall remember this charming and prosperous city, as long as we recall these ; and we shall remember these golden and benignant hours in our spiritual experience. We regret, all of us, that we have not been permitted to see the face and to hear the voice of him through whom this invitation first came to us, and whose cordial greeting had been one of our joyful hopes as we looked forward to this meeting. God has taken him from us, for the time, by removing his earthly father from the scene of his labor and experience here ; and our hearts have gone out after him, and gone up to God on his behalf, and they will continue to follow him, — beseeching the Father to draw nearer to him than ever, and turning the sorrow into bene- diction and making it an impulse of life to him in all the fature of his ministry on earth. My dear friends, we can think and speak most affectionately and gratefully of everything in Cleveland — except the weather ! [Laughter.] And I do not know but that has been providentially designed for our instruction. It has happened to me to be three times in Cleveland on public errands, and each time the weather has been — beyond words. [Laughter.] I have no doubt that you have delightful days here, sunny and summery. But the Arabs, I think, have a proverb, " Blessed be the stranger whose coming brings rain " ; and perhaps you will bless the American Board on that account. [Laughter.] I remember (they were recalled to me this morning by a lady, who may or may not be present in the assembly) the lines of Kingsley, which I quoted once over thirty years ago, and have hardly recalled since, in which he speaks of the " soft south wind " as the " lady's breeze " in England, — " But the black northeaster, Through the snowstorm hurled, Drives our English hearts of oak Seaward, round the world ! '' CONCLUDING ADDRESS AT CLEVELAND. 23 So I hope that this storm, northeast or northwest, or whenceso- ever it has come (there has not been a vane in sight from my window, but I should think it was northeast, from the tone of it), will carry this missionary work only more widely round the world. The American Board has met northeast storms before this, — not physical only, but sometimes spiritual, — and it has always been carried further in its march by the power of them. I have no doubt, in confidence in God and his providence, that it will be so now and henceforth, and evermore. I am reminded as I stand here, more impressively, almost, than ever before, of the swift and silent passage of time, and of the changes which it brings. The first annual meeting of this Ameri- can Board which I ever attended was held in the city of Worcester, Mass., in 1844, forty-four years ago, when I was a youth in the seminary, though already an honorary member of the Board. Chancellor Frelinghuysen was at that time our president. A great political contest was going on, then as now, in the country. Henry Clay, the idol of the Whig party, was its candidate for the presi- dency, and Chancellor Frelinghuysen, our president, was its can- didate for the vice-presidency — one relation in which I delight to be absolutely sure that the successor of Chancellor Freling- huysen in this chair will never be called to stand. [Laughter and applause.] I remember those who were present, almost as if it had been yesterday — Judge Williams, of Connecticut, vice-presi- dent ; the three secretaries. Dr. Anderson, Mr. Green, the father of the brother who addressed us with so much of power yesterday and at the communion service, and Dr. Armstrong, who two years later was snatched from the earth to his rest above in the fierce crash of the steamer Atlantic on the rocks of Fisher's Island. Of the members of the prudential committee, then, I think, number- ing seven, not one is living on the earth — they are living above. Dr. Anderson once said to Dr. Lyman Beecher, after he had heard him speak, " Dr. Beecher, I hope you will live forever." " Well, I expect to ! " said the doctor ; " don't you? " These are living, and in the glorified life of the heavens, but they are no more living upon the earth. Mr. Barnes, who preached the ser- mon at that meeting, has for almost twenty years been in the skies. 24 CONCLUDING ADDRESS AT CLEVELAND. Of the members present I recall a good many not one of whom remains with us now — President Day, Dr. Humphrey, Dr. Woods, Dr. Justin Edwards, I think Dr. William T. Dwight, of Portland, but I am not sure of that, Professor Goodrich, of New Haven, Chancellor Walworth, Dr. Cox, Dr. Skinner, Dr. Patton, whose son still represents the father on your platform. Dr. Edward Robinson, and many others whose names it is not necessary to mention, who have all passed on before us. The first time that I ever heard the name of the town in which it has been my happi- ness to live, almost ever since, mentioned with public honor in a public assembly was at that time, when Dr. Cox invited the Board to meet in Brooklyn the following year, and said, in his stately and delightful way : " In one respect, Brethren, I am like Saul of Tarsus — 'a citizen of no mean city.' " I did not know anything about Brooklyn then. It is not impossible that that re- mark of the doctor had some influence in turning my steps in that direction a couple of years later. That passed away, and seventeen years afterward, or twenty- seven years ago, I still being only an honorary member of the Board, was appointed to preach the annual sermon in this city of Cleveland — in 1861, at the outbreak of the Civil War, or after the first great disaster to the Northern armies in that war, and when the mind of the nation was immensely depressed and widely despondent. And, again, I recall those who were here, and who have passed on into the other and the higher life — Judge Jessup, the vice-president, who took the chair in the absence of Dr. Hop- kins, then, I think, in Europe ; Mr. Dodge, of New York, whose wife continues to represent him so nobly and so steadily in main- taining his annual gifts to the Board, since he has gone into para- dise [applause] ; Dr. Asa D. Smith, Dr. William Adams, Dr. Aiken, of this city, and Mr. Goodrich, in whose church, a Presbyterian church, the Board was assembled. I remember the missionaries who were present — some of them certainly : Dr. Perkins, of Per- sia, and Dr. Chandler, of the Madura Mission, Dr. Lindley, of the Zulu Mission, and others whose names would come to me if I were to pause a moment to recall them. Father Keep, of Oberlin, came into that meeting almost as young, while almost as venerable CONCLUDING ADDRESS AT CLEVELAND. 25 in years, as our dear and honored friend, Dr. Porter, who spoke to us yesterday — I do not know that he was ninety-two, but he was certainly approaching the nineties — straight as a pine tree, and with the old fire burning in his heart and speaking in his voice. These have all gone on before, joining the missionaries who were at the earlier meeting of which I have spoken. Bingham, and Temple, and Dr. Scudder, who is still so nobly represented by his sons in the missionary field, with Spaulding of Ceylon, and Tracy of Singapore, had all, I think, been present at Worcester, but most of them, even before the meeting at Cleveland, had gone on to see the face of the Master. So these reminiscences crowd upon me, as I stand again, after twenty-seven years, in this city of Cleveland, which, at the time of the meeting in Worcester, was a town of about ten thousand in- habitants, chiefly known to me as being not very distant from the town of Hudson, where Western Reserve College was [laughter], and which I think, at the meeting in 1861, was a town of not more than forty thousand inhabitants, though I may not be wholly cor- rect about that. We meet now, in this great, prosperous, famous, expectant city, of two hundred and fifty thousand people, in a land from which all storms of war have passed away, and on which beams the benignant sunshine of divine favor, in the midst of another political contest, but a political contest the ultimate effect of which, we know beforehand, whether our personal hopes are realized or disappointed, will be for the honor of the Master, and the advancement of his kingdom of peace and righteousness on the earth. Well, the Board lives, though its members die ! The Gospel is young, though those who have loved it, and taught it to others, ascend to the fulfillment of its glorious promises. The mighty plans of God march on to their fulfillment, though those who have seemed to be important instruments in the accomplishment of those plans are taken by him into his immediate presence. The missionary work of the world is a fundamental work, under- neath all educational and all political advancement, and all human- itarian progress ; and the missionary thought is the living thought to-day in the best minds of Protestant Christendom ; and we are 26 CONCLUDING ADDRESS AT CLEVELAND. to trust God for the future. The nations are being woven to- gether in continually more intimate political and moral alliances. Protestant Christendom has a power in the world, with a fame, and a mighty influence, which it never had before since history began. We are nearer the consummation, we are nearer the mil- lennial period, than when the Board met first at Farmington, or afterward at Worcester, and we need never be discouraged. I sympathize with every word of appeal which has been ad- dressed to us from this platform, this morning and on other days, urging enlarged contributions. I am glad to respond to it with all my heart, so far as my personal contribution is concerned, by promising to double it. [Applause.] I cannot promise to double the contribution of the church with which I am connected. We doubled it last year. Four times, in two years, is perhaps too much. And we have had everything to do in our own city. When I went there we had not an institution, educational or humane, with the exception of a small orphan asylum. We have had to build all our institutions in these forty years, and to build them from a population which is new to the place, not bound to the soil, having no local attachments. It has been hard work. We have claims pressing upon us, also, from every side — from our denom- inational work, and from Christian interests and enterprises reach- ing all over the country ; and I cannot say that we will make our contribution ;$8,ooo next year. We will do what we can, and I am sure there will be a good many who will be entirely ready to double their gifts. But, my dear friends, do not let any feeling of despondency come into our hearts because we have not had such large pecuniary responses as we perhaps expected here. The Board, in its wisdom — which I never questioned except once, and that was last year — ruled out honorary members from the invitation to these meetings. Well, perhaps it was necessary ; I do not judge about that. I had nothing to do with it myself, one way or the other. But let us distinctly understand that if we rule out the honorary members from cheerful and cordial hospitality on these occasions, we lose the moral power of these meetings. [Applause.] We do not reach out into all the small parishes of the country, as we used to, to stimulate faith, and to inspire to CONCLUDING ADDRESS AT CLEVELAND. 2 7 noble work ; and I hope, for myself, though I have very little voice in the administration of this* institution [laughter], that by and by the time will come when we shall have them again, and when appeals like these which our dear brethren, the secretaries and others, have made will come, not merely to us, who are converted ahready on this subject and do not need to have any quickening perhaps, in the impulse of our hearts, but to all, representing all the churches everywhere. Let us bring that back, if we can. But, at any rate, let us not be discouraged. Why, I remember that in the old time a debt of twenty or thirty or forty thousand dollars always seemed to me to be the normal condition of the treasury of the American Board. [Laughter.] It was so at Bos- ton, and it was preeminently so at Worcester. And, by the way, there came to us a great donation at Worcester, or soon after — forty or fifty thousand dollars — the result of which was to dry up widely the small sources of income from the scattered churches, who thought the Board was now so rich that it did not need any help ; and the result was a debt larger than the one that had gone before ! Here at Cleveland, in 1861, when there did not seem to be any money in the country for any purpose, except national preservation, we had a debt of nearly $30,000. I am not going to be worried, therefore, if these brethren go on and come out at the end of the year with a debt of $100,000. I do not want them to, but at the same time, I should not be distressed if they did. Debt ! Many a man has grown rich by the exertion to which he was prompted in order to relieve himself from pe- cuniary indebtedness. I have sometimes thought that the in- debtedness of commercial Christendom was the secret of its prosperity. If men had large resources, permanently invested, and had nothing to do but to cut coupons as they came due, they would grow lazy, and rust, as the railroads do sometimes. An engineer said, you know, that he left his railroad because there was nothing of it left except the right of way and two streaks of rust ! It might be so with us. Let us not be discouraged. We are going to carry on this work, and to carry it on with more vigor, more power, wider operation, and grander success than ever before. [Applause.] Let us have faith ! Suppose a man 28 CONCLUDING ADDRESS AT CLEVELAND. shows to me a horseshoe, and then points to a pond, and says,^ " If you throw that horseshoe into the pond, it will sink, won't it?" "Yes, iron is heavier than water," "Well, how are you then going to build a steamship all of iron and make that float ? No, build your steamship and sail it on dry land." Well, there is not much profit in that kind of experiment. Build your ship, mould its lines aright, and then trust it to the water and see how it floats, light as a duck, mightier than any of these steam-trains that are hurrying through your city hour by hour. It is because of the air within, which holds it up. So I say about the Ameri- can Board, Frame your policy, lay out your plans ; do it con- siderately, prudently, wisely, but do it with absolute confidence and faith. Then let the breath of the Spirit of God, which is within it, lift it on the waves, and the breath of the Spirit of God which is in it will carry it on its triumphant course over the ocean to all shores. [Applause.] Now, Brethren, I did not mean to say five words where I have said fifty. I believe I have spoken more words, written or spontaneous, in this city of Cleveland than ever in any other city of the world except Brooklyn, New York, and Boston. I will not detain you longer, but do let us all be courageous, and let us sing the songs of victory as we journey toward the celestial Jeru- salem. If the end on earth is coming to us soon, as to some of us it certainly is, and as it will to all before many years, let us remember that the darkness of Death to the believing disciple is just the breaking of the immortal Morning. I have thanked you on behalf of the Board. I wish to thank you, especially, on be- half of the secretaries and the others associated in the adminis- tration of the Board, and on my own behalf, for the most generous hospitality which we have received, and for the aid and succor which have been given to us in all our work here by the people and the pastors of Cleveland. You undertook, I think, some years ago, to annex a town lying on the west of the Cuyahoga River, which is called Brooklyn. I believe you did not succeed. The Brooklyn in which I live is rather too big, as well as too distant, to be annexed, with its eight hundred and more thousand inhabitants, to this beautiful and advancing city of Cleveland — CONCLUDING ADDRESS AT CLEVELAND. 29 too big to be annexed to anything, probably, though we some- times think of annexing New York ; but so far as I am concerned, who may stand in some humble way as a representative of Brook- lyn, your kindness in welcome and in courteous attention has annexed me, in the spirit, to Cleveland for all time to come. [Applause.] So, on behalf of the Board, I express to you our most grateful acknowledgments and thanks, and say, with all my heart, God bless you ! [Applause.] II. aSelatiottjSJ of ifforetgn jHijSjstonjs anD Commerce* ADDRESS AT THE ANNUAL MEETING AT NEW YORK, 1889. WITH CONCLUDING ADDRESS. RELATIONS OF FOREIGN MISSIONS AND COMMERCE. We are met, my dear friends, for the characteristic work of the modern Christian world. It is not the formulation of creeds ; that was done, so far as the great creeds are concerned, many centu- ries ago, and we accept them. We accept the Apostles' Creed and the Nicene Creed as heartily and fully as my beloved brother and friend of fifty years since. Bishop Huntington, who is sitting by me on the platform, accepts them for himself. We have no need to revise, and we have little need to add to, the creeds that were battle-hymns of the Church in the time of its purity, of its trial, and of its victory. We are not gathered here, either, for the incitement of crusades to recover the Holy Land, as at tiie Coun- cil of Clermont or the Assembly at Etampes, where the fiery eloquence of Bernard set Western Europe aflame. The only Jerusalem for which we chiefly care is the new Jerusalem, descend- ing out of Heaven from God upon the earth. We are not here even for the reformation of religion ; as we are certainly not here for that great work which was the principal aim of Christian Europe for centuries, the building of immense and magnificent cathedrals. We are here to take the Gospel, as we have received it, and as the substance of it shines in the ancient creeds, to prop- agate it, to the utmost of our power, and to the extent of our reach, throughout the earth, and to accomplish the effects which are appropriate to it. These effects are large and various, and unspeakably precious. The primary and supreme effect upon which our attention is fixed is the conversion of individual souls to the Son of God. We believe that the Son of God has been upon the earth ; that he came as a Divine person, to illustrate hoHness, to teach the divine law, to make propitiation by his cross, and to open the gates of 34 RELA TIONS OF FOREIGN Heaven to all believers. We believe that to convert a soul to him is to save it from death, and to hide a multitude of sins. We believe that the earth has been luminous with the presence of the Master, that it has shined in the supernal flush of his miraculous power, that since his resurrection it is nearer to the heavens than ever before ; and our chief desire, which governs and limits every other, is to lead men individually to the acceptance of this Son of God, that we may thus glorify him on the earth, and that we may make Heaven more populous with renewed and triumphant spirits. This is our first work ; the work for which our mission- aries go forth — men and women the choicest that we have ; the work for which we gladly take counsel together, and for which we gladly give as God has prospered us, that these men and women may go to work effectually in distant lands. Men may call us fanatical if they like ; it is of no account. We do positively believe that there is, through Christ, an open way to the Heavenly life ; we do positively believe that he is now in the world by his Spirit, calling men unto himself ; we do positively believe that the noblest work any man or woman can do upon the earth is to lead others to the knowledge and love of God in Christ, that they may rejoice in a higher hope on earth, and in a nobler praise and glory in the life everlasting. Our deepest feel- ing is stirred, our highest enthusiasm is moved, by that sublime aim of this institution. But then, with that, we also contemplate effects upon the world at large, and upon the present world, in its physical, political, governmental, and social condition. For whatever the Gospel touches it lifts ; it lifts communities as well as persons ; and whatever affects individuals affects at last, and rapidly, the com- munities which they form. It seems to us, therefore, with refer- ence to this institution, that it has a fair claim upon the earnest sympathy of all who desire human welfare ; a fair claim upon the sympathy and honor of this great and famous, this prosperous and powerful city, in which we are met. Aside from that, I do not know but it has been rather a misfortune than a good fortune that our assembly has been surrounded by this magnificent environ- ment of material wealth and splendor, amid which we gather. MISSIONS AND COMMERCE. 35 We come because summoned by the tender and affectionate invi- tation and welcome of this church. But I have sometimes thought that if you had a ruby or a pearl which you wished to keep at hand and yet to conceal from others, as good a way as any would be to set it in some angle of a great, glittering, burnished plaque, the general sheen of which would contrast and conceal the modest though lovely luster of the gem. In somewhat the same way a con- vocation for the consideration of missionary themes, and the rein- forcement of missionary enthusiasm, in this magnificent metropolis of the New World, seems to be directly at hand, and yet to be largely hidden from public observation. We are here in a center of the world's wealth ; in a city whose name is famous wherever the United States are known on the earth. Many of us, who have been in foreign lands, have rejoiced to notice that wheresoever we went the name of the city of New York was known and honored ; and if we quoted it as the place of our residence it was almost a passport for us to confidence and protection. We are here in this city, full of splendor, full of power, rich in fame, where the tide of prosperity annually runs up the island twenty blocks a year, with the crests of its wave in marble and freestone mansions ten stories high. [Applause.] In compari- son, this assembly of ours seems a small thing. New York has seen many great, splendid, and fascinating spectacles, none more brilliant or imposing than that of last April, when here was cele- brated the one hundredth anniversary of the inauguration of Washington as President of the United States ; when marching armies, and industrial processions in vast array, testified the uni- versal feeling of reverence for him, and of joy at what was then done ; and a crowd of admiring spectators looked on from all the world. New York has seen many spectacles, if not all as brilliant as that, of the same order. In comparison, of course, our assem- bly seems an almost insignificant thing. We are not a multitude, although we represent a multitude distributed over the country from the river of the Holy Cross to the Rio Grande, from the Lakes to the Gulf, from Plymouth Rock to the Golden Gate. Our aggre- gate annual revenue is less than the annual revenue of many indi- viduals in this city. Our capitalized wealth is far less than the 36 RELATIONS OF FOREIGN capitalized property of multitudes in this city. Our aim seems to many to be a kind of nebulous and theoretical aim, in comparison with the solid, strenuous, stubborn, practical purpose to increase riches and to enjoy them, by which purpose this city has been largely built, and with which it is largely pervaded. And we are here only for a few days. To-morrow we shall disperse ; and it may well seem a natural thing that when we have gone on the trains bearing us away, our having been here will be instantly and utterly forgotten, or remembered only as a most unimportant inci- dent in the unparalleled experience of this great metropolis of the Western World. So, too, the missionary work, by which we are convened and to which we give our counsel and thought and plan, seems to many a most inconsiderable thing — a mere castle in the air, a mere passing mist of enthusiasm, something with which men of the world need not trouble themselves at all. Now, gentlemen and friends, let us recognize the fact that that which is comparatively small in appearance may be great in value and effect. The importance of anything is to be measured by its nature, not by its bulk ; and it has been true in the history of the world that the greatest things have often come — usually come, I might say — "without observation." It seemed a small thing when our fathers, here and at Plymouth, settled themselves to sub- due, to hold, to occupy and renew this rugged and unknown conti- nent ; and yet, though their weakness was their protection, though they were too feeble to be feared in Europe, and almost too few to be counted, their work has changed the course and movement of civilization more than the work of any men of their time, more than the work of all the statesmen of the last two hundred years in Europe itself ; and John Winthrop and William Bradford are greater powers in Europe to-day than Talleyrand and Metternich. Small in appearance indeed, but great in effect ! It seemed a very small thing when the monks and the men who sympathized with them as reformers, in the sixteenth century, faced Europe, and when the contemptuous characterization of the Reformation by the elegant, careless, and skeptical pontiff was that it was " a quarrel among some monks, and Brother Luther appeared to be a man of parts." That was the verdict of the MISSIONS AND COMMERCE. 37 pontiff of the time, whose successor is now looking out from the Vatican windows in the hope of finding some safe retreat for him- self in continental Europe. [Applause.] Great in effect, though not great in appearance ! How ridiculous a thing it seemed that the early Christians should face the Roman Empire, determined to remold and reconstruct it, putting Scriptures against swords, put- ting narratives and letters against marshaled legions, putting oral and sacramental teaching against the fiercest and haughtiest power that the world had known ! But by their work the result accomphshed created Christendom, changed the courses of his- tory, and changed the face of the earth. This Republic is builded to-day, and every home of ours is builded to-day, on the founda- tions laid in dust and in blood by the faith and fortitude, and the heroic consecration, of those unnamed Christian martyrs and teachers of the earliest time. [Applause.] Men might laugh at their work then ; but he who laughs at it now might as well laugh at the shining constellations in the heavens. [Applause.] So it may be that our missionary work — though I will not put it alongside of either of these great historic and prolific movements, if you prefer that I should not — may have a power in it that is to reach forward into future centuries : a power which even this splendid, populous, rich, and renowned metropolis may well rec- ognize and honor, and for which it may well give thanks. Certainly our aim is a noble one. We are not trying to extend a sect ; we are not trying merely to exert an influence on individ- uals, though, as I have said, the influence on individual souls is primary and supreme in our contemplation ; but we are aiming to renew the moral life of mankind. Nothing less than that is the aim which we propose : to renew, as far as we can reach it, the moral life of mankind, so making politics possible, abolishing tyranny, banishing barbarism, calling a halt to the march of oppression, and making the peoples competent and determined to form their own institutions and manage their own affairs. We try to secure the intellectual advancement and elevation of mankind, especially, through the power of the Bible, the most educating book of the world. It touches the child in the nursery, and the philosopher in the university; it reaches the mechanic in his 38 RELATIONS OF FOREIGN labor, and the aged in their retirement and in the dying hour. We mean by the Bible to make the truth of God so present to the minds of men that the intellectual level of the race will be lifted. We mean to make social life harmonious and happy. We mean to make all prosperity more legitimate, and more abundant, than it has ever been before or will be again, except as the power of the Gospel is beneath and behind it. This is our aim, as I say ; and I put it to you if the declaration is not a just one, that this superb metropolis, with all its power and all its fame, which has sympathized so keenly, so eagerly, and so generously, with every people of the world harassed and hun- ger-smitten, oppressed by tyranny, stricken by calamity — that this city should sympathize with us in this majestic aim, and should count it a joy and an honor to take part with us, and with other societies working in harmony with us, for the accomplish- ment of a design so magnificent and so divine. [Applause.] Yes, our work assists all the time the commerce of which this city is the superb and opulent seat. This is not our first work, as I have said ; but it is a work which goes on with the propagation of the Gospel over all the earth. For commerce and the Gospel are in harmony in this, at least, that the aim of each is cosmical, is earth-embracing ; and, it may be said of commerce, as of the wisdom of God, that she " layeth the beams of her chambers in the waters, and walketh upon the wings of the wind." There is no tribe so recent or so ancient, no tribe so remote or so degraded, that the Gospel does not seek it, or that commerce will not gladly reach out far for access to it. They go together. The home of commerce is on the liquid bands that separate yet unite and encompass the continents ; the horizon of commerce is the rim of the planet and nothing less ; and so commerce and Christianity go together, Christianity helping commerce. Not that our missionaries go out for that purpose — they do not barter life for gold. They give life freely, that men whom they did not know, of another language and another race, may by and by wear the immortal crown. But wherever their errand is, and wherever their teaching is felt, there the way is opened for a widening com- merce. Intensity of conviction carries them where the commer- MISSIONS AND COMMERCE. 39 cial agent gladly follows, but would not lead. Who opened Africa, of which we heard this morning ? Mofifat and Livingstone, Christian missionaries. Who opened the interior of China.? Christian missionaries. Who were first in New Guinea and New Zealand, in the Navigator Islands, now famous in the world as Samoa, in the cannibal islands of the Pacific where shipwrecked crews were slaughtered and eaten? Everywhere Christian mis- sionaries ; and the commercial agent follows after. Christian missions make men richer, wherever they get estab- lished. I have wondered many times whether Paul might not have had some such thought in his mind when he wrote to the Corinthians that he and his friends and fellow disciples were " poor, yet making many rich." No doubt he intended spiritual riches, primarily and supremely, as we do ; but the effect of the Gospel preached at Corinth and at Rome, and elsewhere, has always been to make men richer, " having the promise of the life that now is as well as of that which is to come." It honors indus- try — the very hand of the Master which held the power of miracle having held as well the hammer and the saw, A tent- maker was his chief apostle ; and the very hand that subscribed the great epistles which the Spirit had dictated was occupied in weaving coarse tent-cloth. Labor was honored by the Christian disciple, and is honored by the Gospel. One of the most touch- ing things in the Catacombs is to find the poor implements of the martyrs whose blood and bones are there, set aside and conse- crated as memorials of those who wrought in faith and died in triumph. Economy is inculcated by the Gospel ; and the great- est lesson of economy ever taught in the world was not taught by any poUtical economist, but by the Master, when he said, after the miracle of the loaves and fishes, " Gather up the fragments that nothing be lost." With the power of omnipotence to create harvests at a word, he would "gather up the fragments, that nothing be lost ! " The Christian world has taken a lesson of economy from that which it will never forget. All savage passion subdued, domestic desire and aspiration kindled, power invigor- ated, hope lifted, the consciousness of personal right and personal privilege exalted, as men become aware of a new relationship to 40 RELATIONS OF FOREIGN the vast and shining universe around them — these are every\vhere the helpers of prosperity. The world is becoming richer all the time, in Christian nations and in heathen nations where the Gos- pel goes, while the needs of men become more urgent, and the demand for the supply of those needs is more instant and imperative. I believe that it was Mrs. Leeks who said to Mrs. Aleshine, in that pleasant story of the casting away of those two estimable Pennsylvania women, that the missionaries would have to take the heathen a good many times all the way through from Genesis to Revelation before they could persuade them to have force-pumps in their kitchens, and spring-mattresses on their beds. I suppose that is true. It does take a good many times and tasks of patient teaching. But even those inventions have to come at last, because men desire more comfort, better instruments, a larger outlook, when the Gospel has entered into the mind and illumined it, has entered into the heart, and purified and reinforced it. So Christianity helps commerce everywhere, and Christianity has the right to require that commerce shall help it [applause] and shall not hinder it. Christianity has the right to demand that the agents of commerce on foreign shores shall not be men of loose life, vicious manners, and an infidel spirit ; and Christian- ity has certainly the right to require that commerce shall not debase the nations which it is trying to lift [applause], by helping the opium traffic in China, and by pouring millions of gallons of the vilest liquors into Africa. [Loud applause.] Every dollar won by a traffic of that kind ought to burn in a man's hand like a bit of the infernal asphalt which is the pavement of Hell ! [Loud applause.] Riches so acquired simply reek with the blood of immortal souls ; and Christianity would be false to its trust if it did not remonstrate and condemn ; and civilization and commerce are false to their trust if they do not, in this, sympathize with the Gospel of our Lord and of his Christ. Now, men say our work is a great one. Of course it is. It is vast. It reaches over all the earth. But observe, my friends, we have the most powerful instruments of the world to work with — the instrument of the truth as taught by living lips, as shot MISSIONS AND COMMERCE. 41 forth in imperial and magnetic impression from living hearts. It ought to be by this time an unfamiliar sneer in the world — that old sneer of the Roman procurator, " What is truth? — a breath in the air, somethmg that one rush of the legions will scatter to the wind, a mere imagination of some enthusiastic and speculative spirit." Yet men talk in just that way up to this day. I remem- ber to have read that when Mr. Petigru, who was a very ardent and distinguished churchman, was importuning a judge in a court at the South, to adjourn the court over Good Friday, the judge, who was a stiff and steadfast Presbyterian, said : " No, Mr, Petigru, why should I adjourn the court over Good Friday?" " Why," he replied, " it is the day that commemorates the death of our Lord." " No," said the judge, " the court will sit to-morrow " (which was Good Friday). "Well," said Mr. Petigru, "I admit that your honor has one ancient precedent. Pontius Pilate held court on Good Friday." [Laughter.] There are a great many people now who hold, exactly as Pontius Pilate did, that truth is nothing but a vagary, a fancy, a breath in the air. My friends, do not let us be foolish ! Truth is the one thing that changes not, and never decays. It represents the facts of the spiritual universe, — God and the soul, the judgment and the great Hereafter, the cross of Christ and the resurrection, and the life everlasting ; and some- how or other it has certainly come to pass that this truth has taken the most barbarous and savage tribes of men and subdued them, to their well being and to God's glorj'. It took our savage ancestors, and built the great Christian commonwealths of Eng- land and the United States. It has taken savage men every- where, and turned cannibals into Christians, and lifted the lowest races toward higher levels. The truth of God is the inspiration of all that is gracious and lovely, in personal character and in domestic Hfe. There is not a flower in your garden, there is not a blossoming vine on the side of your house, that does not depend upon the sun, and the majestic constellations ; and there is not a grace in any human character, of wife, or child, of parent, or of friend, that does not draw its life and inspiration from the sublime mysteries of the truth, as they are declared to us in the Word of God. 42 RELATIONS OF FOREIGN It is at the basis of public order and liberty. When I hear men talk as they sometimes do, saying in effect that we can dispense with religion, that material prosperity and the authority of jurispru- dence are enough for us, I have it in my heart to say, and some- times on my lips : " Well, if you want to try that experiment, then begin by taking away the foundation of your houses, and leave them standing in the air ! " Truth is at the basis of all political freedom, pubhc liberty, private virtue, and the beauty of private character ; and that is the power which we glory in employing. We are trying to make it articulate in all languages bf the earth. We, and others working in the same line, have made it articulate in 300 languages of mankind already, reducing many of them to alphabetic form that they might take into themselves this truth of God. Two hundred and fifty thousand copies of parts of the Scriptures were circulated in China alone last year. We mean to carry on the work until every family on the earth is as familiar as we have been since the first consciousness of life, with the story of the evangelists, with the arguments of the apostles, with the prophecies of old, and with the final prediction which flashes its glory on the world from the apocalypse, closing and consummat- ing the Scripture. [Applause.] Then we have had great success. Men do not see that always, or believe it. They say about this American Board, sometimes, that there are in it all kinds of plots and plans and engineerings. My dear friends, let us settle this in our minds that this Board, eighty years old, was never so strong, and never more united, than it is at this hour [great applause] and on this platform. [Re- newed applause.] I know it was said some years ago that one of our most popular novelists — a man whose pages I always read with pleasure when they come in my way — had become a socialist ; and somebody replied, " Well, there is no reason for fear in that, for he never was able to construct a plot, or to carry one out, in any of his books." [Laughter.] Now it is per- fectly true of this Board that there are no members in it who are able to construct or to carry out plans or plots. We differ among ourselves sometimes, but we do it with the utmost good nature, and with the sincerest mutual Christian respect and esteem ; and MISSIONS AND COMMERCE. 43 we are going to have $800,000 instead of $650,000 for the rev- enue of this Board. [Loud applause.] We have had great success in all our work. Why, think of it ! Eighty years ago this Board was formed. The whole earth was shut against it. Our earliest missionaries were repelled from India, you remember, not by Hindus, not by Brahmins, but by the English officials, bap- tized in Christian households, trained in Christian churches, going out under a Christian government, and yet so fearful con- cerning their political ascendancy in India that they would not allow American Christian missionaries to land on the Indian shores. That was not quite eighty years ago. Now the whole world is open, except, they say, Turkestan, I don't know ex- actly where that is — probably out West somewhere ! [Laugh- ter.] There were 300 converts, on the outside estim.ate, from heathen- dom when this Board was started ; now there are 3,000,000, and the number is increasing with a rapidity far surpassing the increase of the native populations. [Applause.] More copies of the Scripture went into circulation last year than were in existence, in all the world, at the beginning of this century. That looks like success — success for the past, a reward ; success for the future, a prophecy. Meantime the missionary spirit is widening. Two hundred missionary societies are engaged in the work, or nearly that ; and the time is coming when every church and every Christian will have a practical part and share in, and an enthusi- astic devotion to, this great work. Then we have the supreme power of the Universe on our side, with us and for us. Any man who can see the intersecting lines of the avenues on this island can see the lines of providence converging on one result — the Word of God universal in the world ! All the courses of history for the last five hundred years bear on that fact. The discovery of this continent, the invention of the movable type, the telescope interpreting . the universe, the colonization of this country from Protestant lands, our free republic, our free Christianity — everything bears on this one result, the Word of God, given to us, distributed universally in the world, for his glory, for the welfare of men, for the lifting of the 44 RELATIONS OF FOREIGN race, for the purifying of the earth in preparation for the coming of its heavenly Bridegroom. This is the logic of events. This is the secret of history, the nemesis of nations — every nation that stands against it going down like a rolling thing before the whirl- wind. All forces are marching toward that result — a result as sure as the life of God, as the solidity of the globe itself on which we stand. We have this power working with us and for us, giving portents and predictions already, in the flushing orient sky, of the rising of the Sun of Righteousness, which is to irradiate and illu- minate the world. Our country has done much for mankind in the hundred years of its history, celebrated last April ; but it has put no single or combined and accumulating force into the development of a pure civilization, into the advancing prosperity of mankind, from the beginning until now, which is comparable to the force that it has put into the world-life through the Christian missions of the various communions uniting in this sublimest enterprise, and going forth with the New Testament in their hands and the love of God in their hearts, and with the hope of glory shining on their faces, to enlighten the nations. [Applause.] I shall not see it ; many of you will not see it ; it may be that none of us will see it ; but I believe that the child is now born who will see the time when commerce and Christianity, equally earth-embracing in their aims, and advancing in majestic harmony, shall possess the whole earth ; when the ships of Tarshish shall be foremost, as in the prophetic vision, in bringing their sons from afar, their silver and their gold with them, to the city of the Lord our God ; when " Hohness to the Lord " shall be upon all the bells of those swift horses of the modern commerce whose race-course is the ocean, which go trampling the waves under their iron feet ; when the revolving wheels on every railway and of every steamship shall have the living spirit of truth and of grace within them ; when the trumpets of commerce, which are waken- ing the world on every barbaric shore to new ideas, to new aspira- tions after wealth and culture and liberty and law, shall carry to all those tribes the message of the angel over Bethlehem ; shall carry the mighty story of the Son of God in the world ; shall carry AIISSIONS AND COMMERCE. 45 the great argument of the Pauhne epistles ; shall carry the final prophecy of the New Jerusalem descending out of Heaven from God, and becoming on the earth a tabernacle in which God shall dwell with men. God hasten it in his time ; and unto him be all the praise ! [Prolonged applause.] CONCLUDING ADDRESS AT NEW YORK. Friends and Brethren, of these Inviting and Welcoming Churches: If this were a personal farewell on my part, I should feel that I was saying good-by to my own church, and to the friends who have been nearest to me for more than forty years. For this church has been almost as near and dear to my heart as my own, ever since the time when your pastor, then the Rev, Dr. Thomp- son, gave to me the right hand of fellowship on the evening on which I was installed pastor of the Church of the Pilgrims. He has passed away ; but, the one who has followed him has been simply giving me the right hand of fellowship, a right hand of love and wisdom and of power, from that day to the present, whenever I have met him. He was brought here by me — my weakness being the cause of your gain. For after the meeting of the Board nineteen years ago in Brooklyn, I was so nervously overworked — not in consequence of that only, or chiefly — that it became necessary for me to take a vacation and go to Europe. My people are a shrewd people ; New England in origin, very many of them, trained somewhat in the Yankee wisdom ; and they determined that, as their pastor was now to be away for a year, they would, at any rate, during that time indulge themselves in the luxury of some good preaching. [Laughter.] So they sent over to Liverpool, and brought back our dear brother, Dr. Taylor. He was not so much to bring, in the body, at that time [laughter] ; and there happened to be no import tax on minis- ters. [Laughter.] If the Tabernacle church were obliged to pay an ad-valorem duty on him to-day, they would have to mort- gage their property. [Laughter.] But he came ; and when Dr. Thompson left, in the autumn of the same year, the first desire of this church was toward this young Dr. Taylor of whom they CONCLUDING ADDRESS AT NEW YORK. 47 had heard such glowing accounts from the Church of the Pilgrims, to which he had been ministering for several months. So he came here ; and I have never ceased, from that day to this, to thank God for his coming, and for that temporary absence of mine from my own pulpit which was the occasion of his coming. [Ap- plause.] The Rev. Dr. Virgin and his church have been, also, as near to my heart as any pastor or any congregation of the city of Brook- lyn, in which I live. I had had some hand in the establishment of that church, a good many years ago ; and I have never ceased to rejoice, since he came into its pulpit, in the eloquence of which he has shown you an example this morning, in the brotherly kindness and fidelity, the courage and fortitude and elastic hope, with which he has prosecuted his mission to its remarkable success. Now, dear brethren, as I have said, if I were saying " good-by " in personal capacity and relations I should feel that I was bidding adieu to earthly friends and earthly scenes ; and I could only offer the added prayer that in the heavenly life our mansions — for there are many mansions in our Father's house — might not be far distant from one another. But I am not speaking personally. I am speaking on behalf of this Board, whose officer I am, to thank you for the magnificent hospitality with which you have welcomed and entertained the largest meeting of the corporate members of the Board ever held in its history, with a single exception — that at Springfield, two years ago. One hundred and thirty-one members of the Board have been present at this meeting, 80 from New England, and 51 from outside New England. We rejoice as a Board to have been permitted to share the generosity of these churches in New York, after the long interval which has elapsed since the meeting of the Board here, fifty-seven years ago. We rejoice to have been per- mitted to see the city in which you have your place and do your work. I do not know the statistics of New York fifty-seven years ago. I remember to have observed in some documents published in the spring of this year, giving a historical summary of the prog- 48 CONCLUDING ADDRESS AT NEW YORK. ress of New York for a hundred years, that a hundred years ago there were but 4,200 houses in the then small town, most of them frame houses, some of the more ambitious with brick fronts. There was no Broadway above the present Astor House, The street continued under the name, I believe, of Great George Street. There were less than 30,000 people in the town. It had to pay a city debt by a lottery. It had 22 churches, and one of the prin- cipal churches had just imported a minister to preach to it, on the express condition that he should preach in Dutch. That was New York a hundred years ago. What it was fifty-seven years ago I cannot say particularly, but I know it was comparatively small. Perhaps the public pumps that used to stand on Broad- way had been removed. Broadway was doubtless an important street, not yet supremely so. Now we see this marvelous accu- mulation from all races, languages, and peoples of the earth — this great city, a microcosm, in which every part of the world is represented, and every age of history. We have in this city to-day the world as it was before Christ. We have the world of Christ's time, even the unbeheving world which rejected him. We have the medieval world here, in vast exhibition. We have the world of the Reformation, thank God ! and we have the world of our own free Christian civilization. We have the wildest and the fiercest barbarism, only restrained by mandatory law ; and we have the highest Christian cultivation. And while this magnificent progress has been proceeding with such unparalleled rapidity, we rejoice that the great interests of learning, of worship, and of charity, have been proceeding at equal pace ; in the grandeur of their advance surpassing even this material progress of the city. We rejoice in the prophecy thus given that however rich the world may become, the Gospel is to have free course in it and will be glorified ; that the progress of Christian ideas and influences, of Christian experience and institutions, is to keep pace with all the secular advance of mankind. Not one of those members of the Board who met here in 1832 remains on earth to-day, we are told. The workmen die, but the work goes on. We need not go so far back. Nineteen years ago, as I have said, the Board met in Brooklyn, our churches CONCLUDING ADDRESS AT NEW YORK. 49 there uniting to entertain it. It was the memorable year in which the Presbyterian congregations, up to that time cooperating with the Board, finally withdrew from it. It was a year of solici- tude, and great anxiety. Not all individual contributors with- drew. One of the two largest annual contributors to the Board to-day is a Presbyterian elder in the city of New York ; and if you wish to see an illustration of his superb public spirit, of his elegant taste and cultivated judgment, you will find it in that lovely statue of " Charity " in Union Square. We have Presbyte- rian contributors and friends, and shall have, I hope, as long as the Board continues. But the Presbyterian congregations with- drew at that time, and we felt that there was to be a serious deficiency in our treasury, with a large gap in our missionary circle. They took some beloved and fruitful missions of the Board with them. The result was that they left us a debt of ;J2 2,000, which was paid and extinguished. While our receipts before, from the combined congregations, had been $461,000, they have now risen $200,000 above that highest level. We have been stronger ever since, by reason of the separation which came in all kindness of spirit, in all courtesy on their part and on ours, because they felt that they could work better by themselves. They also have been stronger for the Master's service. I think of the men who were there and who have departed — Dr. Skinner, Dr. William Adams, Dr. Cox, Dr. Patton, Mr. Barnes, President Stearns, Dr. Leonard Bacon, Dr. J. P. Thompson, and many others ! There was my dear friend and brother. Dr. Budington, who made on that occasion one of the most eloquent farewell addresses that ever fell from human lips, and who afterward learned in his own experience that the via cruets is the via lucis, as he went up out of bodily anguish on earth to the vision of the Master, and the glory of the crown ! Thus the workmen die, but the work goes on. None of us, perhaps, will be here again — few of us, certainly — when this Board meets again in this city of New York, with this Tabernacle congregation ; but the work will be advancing, only more vigor- ously than it is in our day, and advancing through the expanding power and ever-increasing harmony and fidelity of this Board. 50 CONCLUDING ADDRESS AT NEW YORK. I was Struck when that great industrial procession filled our streets last spring, with a circular which I received, sent by a man who probably did not know what the purpose and relations of the American Board were. It was a copy of a circular sent to all manufacturing establishments, and was addressed to me as Presi- dent of the American Board [laughter], which asked for an exhibition of our characteristic products. [Laughter.] Well, if I could have arranged a dray, with a cannibal cooking a captive, and then another dray to follow it, with a brother islander singing a Christian hymn, accompanied by a melodeon, I think I might have met the emergency. [Laughter.] But I had not the raw material. [Laughter.] We do not need exhibitions, on a small scale, of the work of missions. We see the characteristic product of the work when we are gathered here, and hear these reports from all parts of the earth. We see the effect, as we see the blue of the water, not in a bucketful, but in the great bay. We see the effect as we see the glory of the sunset, on a panorama that takes fifty square miles of atmosphere to show it. We see the effect all over the world ; and the effect will be only more illustri- ous and more magnificent, and more world- embracing, when the next meeting of the American Board shall be held in the city of New York. The workmen die, but the work goes forward ! And they die, thank God ! into the everlasting life, into the perfect work which is perfect rest, into the vision of the Father and the glory of the just ! Beloved, God bless you in the effect of all this your kindness to us, ■ and in all your Christian work ! May these churches grow as the lily, in all beauty and fragrance of character, and stretch forth their roots as Lebanon, in all power and might, and in an ever-increasing strength. And may this city itself be so illumined by the Gospel that nations shall take new splendor upon them from the irradiation of that truth, and that kings shall come to the glory of the rising of the Sun of Righteousness, as revealed from this glittering focus of commerce and of power upon our shores ! [Loud applause.] III. Cl^e i^ppottunttv of tl^e mm in foreign ADDRESS AT THE ANNUAL MEETING AT MINNEAPOLIS, 1890. WITH CONCLUDING ADDRESS. THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE WEST IN FOREIGN MISSIONS. My Dear Christian Friends : It is with most unfeigned sim- plicity and sincerity of spirit that I express my regret that I have not an address to give you this evening which is adequate to the occasion, or which is suitable to so immense and powerful an audi- ence as is here assembled. I had not anticipated an occasion of this kind, but had supposed it probable that in the church in which we have been holding our meetings I should be expected to make a brief address. I had not thought of occupying the evening, and especially of occupying it in so large a building as this, be- fore an assembly so vast. A tired man, at the end of a day of considerable nervous strain, can hardly be expected to face such an assembly without some tremor of the nerves. And yet there are some things which I shall be most glad to say. There is a feeling not uncommonly entertained by men of the world that the impulse to missions is principally speculative and sentimental ; that it belongs to the thoughtful, to the sensitive, to ministers, and to those who are engaged in the Woman's Board ; but that it has comparatively no relation to men of general prac- tical sagacity and success ; and that therefore we are, as it were, ballooning in aerial heights when we come together to consult for the interest and progress of the cause of Christian missions, in such a meeting as that now being held in this city. I do not so conceive of the matter, and I desire to suggest some things which may tend to show that the work has its right- ful claim upon the attention of all who are interested in the his- tory of their times, and in the progress of civilization in the world. I assume, of course, that we are under the command of our Divine Lord ; that our highest impulses are to come from him, by his Spirit ; that we are under constant and peremptory obliga- 54 THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE WEST tion to preach his gospel to all mankind, wherever mankind can be reached by us. Further, then, it seems to me clear that the ongoing history of the world shows the privilege and the power which belong to this function of preaching the gospel of Christ. The astronomer calculates the orbit of a moving world from observation of it at three different points. When he has its course clearly before him, as it appears at those difTerent points, he can follow it in its course through the untraveled tracks of light. Somewhat so we may follow the missionary cause in its progress in the world. Start -from the point where the Master addresses his disciples, just before his ascension from the earth ; going on from thence, and from the immediately subsequent preaching of the gospel at Antioch and Ephesus and Corinth and Rome to the time of the downfall of the Roman Empire, which empire had first been converted to Christ by the energy of preach- ers, by the zeal and intensity of martyrs, and by the holy living, and the peaceful and triumphant dying, of those who were his followers. Take that point, with the subsequent conversion of the barbarian tribes who poured down upon the empire, shat- tering it, and commingling among themselves in dire collision and confusion, but who were led also to discipleship toward Christ, and then go on to the time of the Reformation, when for the first time a free gospel of salvation for every man by faith in the Son of God was prepared to be preached to the world. There you have two of these points. Thence go on further to the immense missionary developments of this present century, in which all Christian communions are interested together, and the results of which we see in the extension of Christian missions throughout the earth. There you have the three points from which you can reckon the progress of Christian missions in the world, onward, in the centuries to come. There are four facts which suggested themselves to me as I was journeying hither, and which have impressed themselves more and more upon my mind as I have been tarrying here for a day or two, which seem to bear directly upon this onward course of Christian missions in the world. They are familiar facts ; they are secular facts ; and yet they are significant facts ; and while IN FOREIGN MISSIONS. 55 facts are said to be stubborn things — as they are, for argument cannot change them and remonstrance cannot destroy them — they are also suggestive and significant things. Sometimes a series of facts converges in influence on a given point until it involves the mightiest force of reason and appeal. It is like the fire of converging batteries, against which no granite walls and no iron plates can permanently stand. One of these facts, for example, is that which is familiar to us all, and which was referred to in the paper of Rev. Dr. Smith last evening, in the meeting of the Board ; that is the universal ex- ploration of the world in our time. There was no passion for geographical exploration among the cultured nations of antiquity, in Egypt or in Greece. The Hellene looked on all outside of the Greeks as barbarians, and he did not care to know about their countries or their manners. No country was lovely if it was not like Greece, and no manners were delightful if they were other than the Hellenic. Nor did the Egyptian care about the peoples who lived outside, or about the territories which they inhabited. The Roman Empire had no passion for geographical exploration, except as that was connected with plans of military conquest. The early middle ages knew nothing of such desire for informa- tion concerning other countries. That desire came with the Cru- sades, and it was one of the noblest fruits of the Crusades — perhaps, we may almost say, the very best — that people learned to wish to know more of lands which they had never seen, and even the rumor of whose existence had hardly reached them. So the Crusades gave the impulse which sent Marco Polo to the East, and which sent Columbus to the West, on that voyage of discovery, the termination of which our friends in Chicago are expecting to celebrate three years hence. That passion sent out subsequently the Italian, the Spanish, the French, and the English navigators, to circumnavigate the new part of the world, and finally the world itself. That has been a growing passion in the civilized world until this time, and was never more intense than it is at present. There is as intense a curiosity about foreign countries, to-night, which we have never seen, as there is to know who was the man in the Iron Mask, or to know if anybody can 56 THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE WEST explain to us the meaning of considerable parts of Browning's poetry. [Laughter.] I remember fifty years ago that I introduced a classmate of mine, a very capable man and a very good student, but extremely shy, to a very charming young lady, with whom it turned out that he had to take a walk of half a mile in a moonlight night. I was rather interested to know what the subjects of conversation were, how animated the conversation was, and particularly whether any special effect had been produced upon his susceptible heart by that moonlight walk. So when he came back I said to him, " Well, how did the talk come off? " " Oh, very well," said he, " I don't think we went a rod without one of us saying something [laughter] ; and the last question I asked her was whether she did not think that geography was a pretty interesting study." [Laughter and applause.] Well, my fears were entirely relieved with regard to the state of that man's heart. But the question he asked is one to which the world responds now with great emphasis. Yes, geography is one of the most interesting studies in the world ; and there are very few in any community who are not more or less drawn to its pur- suit. So it is that we know the world, as we know the pages of a book which we are reading. We go with the explorer ; we climb the mountains with him, while we sit in our libraries ; we thread the forests ; we slip down the sliding rivers or float on the broad lakes ; we follow the explorer in his camping, and in his journey- ing, and the regions which he has explored are open to our eyes without fatigue and at slight expense. Africa, the last of the countries to be explored, is now almost as well known to us as the regions which stretch from here to the Pacific. We know the passes of the Himalayas ; we know almost as much about the immense realms of the Czar as that frightened man, in terror of his life every hour, knows himself. The very bottom of the sea has been searched ; its mountains and its submarine valleys, and its vast plains, have been declared to us. Every coral reef has been marked upon the map. We know the world ; it is all open before us. Missions and missionaries have contributed largely to this IN FOREIGN MISSIONS. 57 effect ; and the effect has an immense bearing, of course, obvious to every man, on the prosecution of the missionary work in time to come. This is one fact, then : the world is to us an open book, explored on every side. We know it in its totality, and we know it in its parts. Another fact is the increasing interdependence of each part of the world upon every other, which is also a familiar fact, and also a secular fact, but one which has relation to this entire work of Christian missions. It expands, of course, with the extension of the machineries for rapid locomotion over every civilized land, and into many lands where civilization has just thrust its prongs, and is making itself seen and felt. Fifty years ago, as we know, the entire railway system of the world reached over about 5,000 miles. Now it reaches 360,000 miles, 14 times the circumference of the globe ; and travel increases as rapidly as the railway lines run out. Why, in New England, which our friend. President Carter, represents so delightfully, the people transported on the railways for a year outnumbered, it is said, 16 times the entire population of New England. So with the steamships. Fifty years ago they were scarcely known, and now the whirl of the propeller and the splash of the paddle are heard on all the waters of the world. Telegraph lines were then undreamed of. Now there are 600,000 miles of telegraph lines on the globe — enough to reach out to the moon and back again, with a remainder suffi- cient to go five times around the world. These facilities for intercourse are generating and stimulating intercourse all the time. In 1886, I have seen it stated, there were 70,000,000,000 of letters interchanged between the inhabi- tants of the earth. And the process is going on into countries, as I have said, which have hitherto been entirely barbarous. In Japan, not barbarous, but shut out from our civilization by its own elec- tion until recently, there are many miles of railway already estab- lished. Very soon all peoples reaching after these increased facil- ities of locomotion from point to point will be knit together in consequence ; so that now every part of the world is dependent on every other part. 58 THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE WEST THESE GREAT FARMS in Dakota and Minnesota oppress the Englisii and French agricul- turists. They cannot help doing it. They say it costs less to carry the product of five acres of wheat from Chicago to Liver- pool than it costs to manure a single acre of wheat in England. The result is of course a tremendous competition, against which the English and French farmer can hardly maintain himself. Out in Dakota they say the labor of one man for a year is equivalent to the production of 5,500 bushels of wheat; and here, in your city of Minneapolis, the labor of one man for a year is equivalent to the transformation of that wheat into a thousand barrels of flour ; and the labor of two men it is calculated, for a year, will transport that flour from here to the docks of New York. But then Dakota and Minnesota are not to have all of this to them- selves. In India they are raising wheat which is to compete, and does compete, in the markets of the world with these great grain fields of the Northwest. Every country has something to give which other countries want. One effect of this is, of course, that a general famine becomes henceforth impossible. In China a few years ago five millions of people died of starvation, in a year in which the crops of one part of the country were unusually abun- dant ; and the only reason was that there were no facilities for transportation, which civilization would have given, by which the supplies, abundant in one quarter, could have been sent to the destitute districts not far off, while they could not be transported by man or by horse-power. Such a danger is hereafter impossi- ble, every part of the world contributing something to every other part. One of the most curious illustrations of this that I have seen is given by Mr. David A. Wells in a book on Economic Changes — a very interesting, suggestive, and fruitful book — in which he speaks of the curious fact that the allowing of bounties on the production of beet sugar in Germany and France multiplied pi- rates in the Malay Straits ; the explanation being that by that offer of bounties on the part of the German and French, and I think the Austrian, governments for the production of beet IN FOREIGN MISSIONS. 59 sugar, the production of that in Java was disturbed ; the market for the Java sugar was no longer open ; laborers had to be dis- charged, and the easiest resource for them was to turn to piracy. It is a curious fact as illustrating this interdependence of distant peoples upon each other. Lord Brougham once said that not an ax fell in the American forest but it set in motion a shuttle in Manchester ; and we may say almost literally that there is not a farm, there is not a city staked out anywhere here on the prairies, but a thrill goes from it throughout the civilized world. The earth is one great neighborhood ; human society is one great cos- mical organization ; and every member of this great society has relation to every other. Then the third fact is that the wealth of the world, and espe- cially of the civilized and Christian world, is increasing with im- mense rapidity. We see it among ourselves, and we need not go elsewhere to find an illustration. In 1861 the production of silver in this country was $2,000,000; in 1888 it was $59,000,000. In the 35 years between 1850 and 1885 the entire gold product in civilized countries was multiplied fourfold, over what it had ever been before. In 1868 the value of uncut jewels imported into this country, largely consisting of diamonds, was $1,000,000. Twenty years later, in 1888, it was $io,coo,ooo. Statistics show that in the savings banks, and in other institu- tions for deposit, paying interest on such deposit, in thirteen States of this Union, the deposits were fifteen hundred millions of dollars last year. This shows the immense increase of wealth among us. But this wealth is not confined to this country. You know how the English wealth is flowing out in all directions, and into all lands. They are buying flour-factories here in Minneapolis, and beer-factories in Brooklyn, and iron-foundries in Pennsylvania, and great ranches in the Southwest. France is a richer nation to-day than it was before Sedan, with all the disasters of the war, and all the tremendous war tributes which she had to pay to Ger- many ; and Germany is simply feverish, and almost riotous, in the new riches which have been poured upon her. The same thing goes on in lands which the Gospel has only 6o THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE WEST begun to touch. In India such is the multipHcation of the machinery for cotton spinning and weaving that India begins to supply Japan and China as well as herself. The Lancashire man- ufacturers complain that not only has their market in India been practically closed to them, but that India is intercepting them in lands beyond. The cultivation of the cinchona tree in India has largely limited the traffic of Colombia and Peru, and made quinine, in more than one sense of the word, a drug in the mar- ket. [Laughter.] India sends us better teas, because stronger teas, than we get from China. In Japan, with its thirty-six mil- lions of population, on an area as large as the State of Califor- nia, only a very small part of which has been hitherto under cultivation, the area of cultivation is extending, and the wealth of the people continually increasing. The world is growing richer with every year, by every stroke of labor, by every touch of the genius of invention, by every swift wheel of commerce ; and the discontent of labor comes out of that fact, paradoxical as it may seem. The laborer has higher wages to-day than he had two years ago. The price of commod- ities is thirty per cent, less than it was twenty years ago, and the laborer has more money with which to buy cheaply, and live more comfortably. But man is a creature, as it has been said, of progressive wants. He wants something better than he has. If he has broadcloth he wants furs. If he has a comfortable house, he wants a library, pictures, and, perhaps, a billiard room, and very likely a lawn and stable. If a man had a house built of gold, and floored with silver, he would want it ceiled with mother of pearl, and with diamond plates in the windows. [Applause.] The laborer sees this IMMENSE INCREASE OF WEALTH, and while he knows that he is more comfortable than his father was before him, and that his children are likely to be more com- fortably placed than he is himself, he does not feel that he gets his fair share of the immensely increasing accumulation of wealth which he sees all around him. The unrest of the laboring classes IN FOREIGN MISSIONS. 6 1 is simply a sign of this immense accumulation of wealth in all civilized countries. And it is to go on. The earth has not yet put on her beautiful array of civilization. There seems to be no limit to this indefinite advance. We see in patches and in fringes, here and there, what the final superb garments are to be ; but they who live a hundred years or two hundred years after us will see such wondrous orna- mentation of the earth with the power of this wealth as we, as yet, can scarcely conceive. There is another fact, still, which comes in connection with this, and that is the immense simultaneous advancement of this great West in all the elements of wealth, of intelligence, of material prosperity, of intellectual and physical power. Remember that when this Board was organized there was no West beyond the Ohio ; that was the point where the sun descended on this conti- nent, from the eyes of civilized men. Fifty years ago there were only a few scattered beginnings of the West as it now is. The advance has been not by steps, but by leaps ; not by gradual motion, as of a softly flowing current, but rather, as a swift mo- tion of the current over rapids. So it is that we have this pro- digious territory, which almost passes our understanding, so largely and so rapidly occupied as it has been, and is, and is to be. Why, look at New England on the map of the country, and see how easily it could be tucked away in some comer of this great North- west ! I almost feel like apologizing for having been born there [laughter and applause], but it was not my fault. [Renewed laughter.] You have not only this immense extent of prairie, with these vast lakes and rivers, these wealthy mines, these moun- tain ranges, but you have all the comforts of civilized life in their completeness; all the railway systems, all the beautiful mechan- isms, all the social institutions, libraries, colleges, universities, thousands of churches, hundreds of thousands of Christian homes. With all this material advance you have the moral advance keep- ing in line with it, and not infrequently keeping in front of it. It is a great fact in the history of the world that this splendid town should be builded on the camping ground and the fighting ground of heathen tribes ; that the bivouac of the immigrant is now the 62 THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE WEST site of cities ; that the bison has disappeared only that the West- ern boomer may take his place. [Laughter and applause.] Here then are these four facts going together : our perfect acquaintance with the world at large ; the interdependence of every people upon every other people ; the enormously increasing wealth of the civilized world; and the rapid development of power and wealth, intelligence and culture, and moral life, in this vast region of the West. Now there are some things which it seems to me a man of the world must see if he looks at these four facts, and admits that there is any authority in the Master of Christendom, or any power in the Word which he gave to the world. One is that Christian missions only move in the line of the world's progress, and that they are aided powerfully by all these sudden advances in human civilization. Of course the Gospel encounters opposition wher- ever it goes : the opposition of the human heart ; the opposition of great institutions antagonizing the Gospel ; the opposition of literature and of the priesthood ; the opposition of tradition, and settled and dominant habit. It must encounter that opposition everywhere, as it has done from the commencement of the Chris- tian history ; but it is helped by the streams of civilization, on every side and in every land. It simply goes with civilization. The Gospel had to break into India, by a spasmodic and almost convulsive endeavor. It had to break into Burmah in the same way. It had to break into the Indian tribes in this Northwest in the same way ; but now it is carried upon the great vehicles of civilization. The trend of the world's progress helps it forward, in every direction ; and the very ships which carry rum and powder to savage shores have to carry missionaries and Bibles with them. Another fact is that the progress of Christian missions, signal as it is, does not at all keep up, as yet, with the progress of the world in its machineries, and in its rapidly accumulated wealth. Does not keep up, did I say? Why, it is a mere sluggish rill be- side the mighty Mississippi current ! The world is rushing for- ward, and the Church is limping after it in the work of missions. Secretary Smith said the other evening that eleven millions of IN FOREIGN MISSIONS. 63 dollars were annually contributed to foreign missions. What are 1 1 1,000,000 a year compared with the riches piled up in the hands of the children of God on the earth with every succeeding year ? Men of the world do not take an interest in missions, be- cause they do not understand them to be a means of power. How hard it is to understand that ! The Gospel is a Gospel of grace, but it is a Gospel of power as well. It is as real a power that changes a savage, or lifts a ruffian into moral manhood, as is the power that tunnels a mountain, or makes a bullet traverse the air ; and it is as real a power which lifts up a tribe into civilized society, into moral aspiration, into the dig- nity of moral character, as is the power which sends steamships out upon the sea, or which transforms a bar of iron into a bar of steel. Some time men will find out that the only undecaying power, the only indomitable power in human civilization, is the power of the Gospel of Christ, God's word of power as well as of grace for the world. But, as I say, men of the world do not understand this. They do not see the great missionary movement in its real significance. They do not understand the great figures of the missionary movement. I remember a cartoon of the Reforma- tion by William Kaulbach, which I saw in his studio in Munich twenty years ago, which afterward was brought to this country, having been purchased by an American gentleman, and which is now, I think, in the Eastern States. It is a magnificent picture, representing the progress of the centuries up to the point of the era of the Reformation, with all the great thinkers, the great in- ventors and men of science, and the noble rulers, set in a majestic and charming group. The picture was exhibited in New York after it came to this country ; and it so happened that in the same collection with it was exhibited a somewhat florid picture in brilliant colors. I think the subject was "A Spanish Garden Party." A friend of mine was in the room and observed that some persons walking about, and looking at the pictures, had got the card-key of the picture of the Reformation, and were apply- ing it, with considerable difficulty and confusion of mind, to the picture of the Spanish Garden Party. [Laughter.] They made 64 THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE WEST out that Copernicus was evidently a monk ; that Columbus was probably a Moorish juggler ; that a Spanish dame, with plumes on her head and a falcon on her wrist, in very showy garments, was, no doubt, Queen Elizabeth ; that a page who was leading a pet terrier by a silk cord was, in all probability, Martin Luther. [Laughter.] That is just about the way the men of the world judge of the missionary figures, illustrious in the history of this century. [Laughter and applause.] They think Henry Martyn was a dyspeptic recluse ; that Judson was a man who might have made a capital engineer, or a not unsuccessful politician, who absolutely threw himself away ; and they think of Livingstone as a desperate crank. Some time or other in the midst of all the rush of material progress, men of the world will find out that missions have in them the power which is to lift the world nearer to the throne of God j and that the men and the women who go out with their lives in their hands to carry the tidings of grace and salvation to those whom they have never seen, whose languages they learn with difficulty, and to whose social customs they cannot adjust themselves, having to live as Christians in the midst of unchris- tian peoples — that these are the true heroes and heroines of the century in which we live ! Thus will come accelerated progress. Some time or other men will find out, I reaffirm it, that the only undecaying power in human civilization is the power of the Gospel of Christ. The third of the suggestions is that this great West is to have a mighty part in this sublime enterprise for God and for men, which so many of the tendencies of the world and so much of the trend of civilization are carrying forward toward grander success. This is the opportunity of the West. This is its privilege, and this is its mighty obligation. It has the money ; it has the men and the women ; it has the young life. Some day it is to take hold of this work with an in- tensity of spirit, with a firmness and even stubbornness of pur- pose, with a liberality of counsel and of gift, which as yet have nowhere appeared on the continent. The West needs it for itself ! It needs to keep the spiritual predominant over both the material IN FOREIGN MISSIONS. 65 and the physical. The man, no matter what his power, no matter what the strength of his sinews, or the strength of his mind, or the multitude of his possessions, if he is only physically and or- ganically strong, with a weak spiritual sense within, is nothing else and nothing more than a gigantic moral idiot. A great house, I do not care how sumptuous it is, if it has not a rich, moral life within it, is simply a gigantic granite bubble, which the elements will force to crumble and disappear. And so the West, with all its vast prodigality of resources, with all its magnificent develop- ment, needs this spiritual power within it, constantly renewed, energized, and unfolded, in order that it may reach the supreme heights of character and culture, and influence in the world, which are possible to it, and which God designs for it. Then it may take hold on the hands of God, as the fathers of New England did, in their loneliness and poverty, on their bleak coasts with which these shining expanses and these magnificent cities are in such extraordinary contrast. There was their power : they had a sense of God's plan concerning them and the country they were civilizing, and in which they were establishing organized Christian commonwealths. They had the sense of walking in the plans of the Almighty, of having supernal assistances before and behind them, and supernal inspirations within them ; and their strength was such that the fever and the frost could not destroy it, and hunger and famine and pestilence, and savage foe and savage beast, could not constrain one of them to leave those shores. Now, God had a plan about this West. It has not come by chance. He spread out the expanse of the prairies ; he traced the mighty course of rivers ; he lifted the mountain ranges ; he made them wealthy with inexhaustible mines; he rapidly colo- nized, when his time had come, this mighty West. There is as dis- tinct a plan in God's providence for this country as there is in the game of any chess-player, or in the campaign of any general. He settled the fathers on the sandy shores of Plymouth, by the impulse of the religious determination to be free — the strongest passion of the human soul. Then he carried them forward into the fertile lands along the Mohawk and the Ohio ; and that spirit of rehgious freedom gradually ceased to be in danger of becom- 66 THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE WEST ing frenzied and fanatical. It subsided into the milder moral temper which afterward appeared. He thus colonized the West by degrees. But then there were the great alkali plains ; there were the Rocky Mountains, whose passes were not known. It was necessary that the Pacific coast should be occupied by the same people, and a man picked up a flake of gold in the dry bed of a mill stream, and an empire was poured across the continent almost in a decade. That is God's plan concerning this country. He had a plan for the West as well as for the East ; and whenever the West rises to this magnificent work, with full exertion on its behalf of every power, and full consecration to it of every re- source, it will feel God nearer than ever, and angels from the throne of God will behold a power and a beauty upon it which no physical wealth or advancement could possibly confer. And when the West comes to that point, then it will give not money only, but men and women. Personal service is what Christ asks. It is a very curious fact that with all the fall in the price of commodities in the last thirty years, there has been no diminution in the price paid for service — in domestic service, in journaHsm, in educational work, among artisans, engineers, and clerks. Everywhere the rate of payment for personal service is higher than it was then. Christ wants PERSONAL SERVICE from those who follow him. Mary's gift of ointment amounted in money equivalent to a year's wages of a laboring man in Pales- tine at that time ; but it was cheap in comparison with the per- sonal element which entered into it, and which has made it not only dear to the heart of Christ, but immortal in the earth, wher- ever the Gospel of Christ has been preached from that hour to this. He wants personal service from you and from me ; and when we are alive to the obligation to obey him and the mighty privilege of that obedience, our personal service will be given easily, gladly, and triumphantly. The West wants to give great enthusiasm to this work; it is capable of great enthusiasm in things physical, and things mate- rial. A gentleman who was riding with me on the cars from New IN FOREIGN MISSIONS. 6/ York the other day said, in regard to your vast railway systems, "In New England we think it is a tremendous thing to build a railway forty miles long ; but out here at the West they build a railway two hundred miles long, simply to get to a place to start from to go somewhere else." [Laughter and applause.] The enthusiasm carries it swiftly forward, and abroad, on these magnifi- cent material enterprises. It will carry it some time or other for- ward, and upward, and onward, with mighty power and speed, in this great cosmical work of Christian missions. It will see for what God made it ; it will see for what he filled it with such mul- titudes of cultured and powerful minds and hearts. It will enter into the eternal plan with an enthusiasm that will make itself felt to the ends of the earth — an enthusiasm that will stir the languid and the dull wherever it smites them and hasten the coming of the kingdom of God and of his Son in glory ! Ah, my friends, this is the time. This American Board has just passed through a period of debate. It is now out of the woods : it is on the King's highway. [Loud applause.] The darkness is passed and the dawn is here. I came across the Alle- ghanies, from regions in which all the foliage was dull and gray. In the AUeghanies it was prismatic in its rainbow beauty. As I crossed Ohio, Illinois, and Wisconsin, and came hither, there was still the same magnificence on every side, — the shining orange, and gold, and crimson on all the trees, as if some giant hand had caught the forests and tied them in magnificent bouquets. And I said to myself : " Here is this picturesque prodigality of splendor, representing the picturesque prodigality of spirit when the Lord's time shall come." That is the spirit for which we wait. The air of it is not autumnal ; it is the air of hope and confidence, — the air of spring, though the splendor of the autumn is all around. You remember what Angelo said of the superb work of the sculptor Donatello, after long contemplating his wonderful figure of St. George on the outside of the church of San Michele at Florence. The great sculptor looked at it with admiration and surprise. Every limb was perfect, every line complete, the face lighted almost with human intelligence, the brow uplifted, the form poised as if it would step into life. And as the bystanders 68 THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE WEST. waited anxiously for the verdict, the great sculptor, looking still upon the statue, slowly lifted his hand and said : " Now March ! " It was the grandest encomium he could have given to the figure of St, George in marble. My friends, that is God's word for us. ** I have given you power, I have given you knowledge, I have given you the means of influence ; now March ! " [Applause.] CONCLUDING ADDRESS AT MINNEAPOLIS. Dr. Thwtng, and Gentlemen of the Committee : It is my pleas- ant office at the close of this meeting to return to you all, and to the families which have been represented by you, the most hearty and fervent thanks of the Board for the extreme kindness with which you have met us, for the bounteous hospitalities which you have offered, and for all that you have done to make our meeting successful in its discussion and its action. Every place of duty, so far as I know, brings with it also a privilege. The office of President of this Board brings some responsibilities and labors, but it also brings great privileges. It excuses him from taking part in debate ; it permits him to respond to the words of saluta- tion with which the Board is welcomed, and to respond to the word of good-by with which the Board is dismissed, where other- wise on these two delightful occasions, his lips must be mute. So I accept the privilege, and rejoice to avail myself of it in return- ing now the thanks of the Board. We are grateful for the opportunities of seeing parts of this great Northwest. I confess that I was somewhat reminded on Tuesday of an old farmer in Fryeburg, Me,, who came over to Conway, where I was spending the summer, on the occasion of the Fourth of July. Probably he had never been outside of his village before. There was a large crowd, a band, and a procession ; and in the afternoon he said to his sons who had brought him over, " Boys, I must go home ; I had no idea that the world was so big, and that there were so many people in it. It makes my head ache ! " [Laughter.] Well, I have got over that, and if I were to stay here a month my brain would begin physically to expand, no doubt, without pain to the skull, and be some- 70 CONCLUDING ADDRESS AT MINNEAPOLIS. what proportionate to the dimensions of this vast section of the country. We are grateful for the spirit of inspiration and courage which you have given to us. We are grateful — more, I had almost said, than for anything else — for the sense of Christian fellowship with those living far away, many of whose faces we have not be- fore seen, but whose pulses we feel beating to the same celestial truths which guide and impel our hearts, as often as we touch their hands. It strengthens every one of us in the Christian faith, and in Christian purpose, to know that there are such mul- titudes afar who are praying to the same Master, loving the same divine Word, working on the same divine errand in the world. This will be a notable meeting, I am sure, in the history of the American Board. I said the other day, when I had the privilege of responding to the address of welcome, that I was never afraid of discussion. We cannot better get at the roots of things. 1 think the discussion which we have been having here has illus- trated the truth of that remark. We have come to results with which we are satisfied. It has not been a tornado of discussion, tearing up things by the roots, and scattering debris on every side. It has not been a blizzard of discussion, shedding desolation and death from its icy wings. It has been a good strong Northwest breeze of discussion [applause], which carries its tonic vigor all over the land, which revives life and energy everywhere, and which reaches down to the sun-smitten shore of the Atlantic in summer time. We rejoice in the results to which we have been led. We shall always remember, gratefully to you and to God, the opportunity we have had of holding this our meeting, a very decisive meeting as I think, in this city of MinneapoHs. I have had a letter from Dr. Herrick, our dear brother in the Turkish mission, written just as he was leaving to return to his field, denying himself the pleasure of being at this meeting in order that he might be a week or two sooner on his field of labor. I was very much struck with a remark which he made in the let- ter. He said that, as far as he knew, in all languages of civilized people, the words of parting are uniformly words of hope and of prayer. I thought at once to myself how far ray own knowledge CONCLUDING ADDRESS AT MINNEAPOLIS. Ji corresponded with that, and I was sure that it was so in the French, German, Italian, and English languages. Our words Good-by, or God be with you ; Farewell : they are full of hope and of prayer. And it is in that spirit that I say to you, my dear brother, and to all the members of these committees, and to all the households who have so generously entertained us, Good-by, God be with you ! Fare ye well ! until the time comes when from the North and the South, from the East and the West, we come to meet together in the kingdom of the Father, and to sit together in the heavenly places where we shall see the face of Christ. [Loud applause.] IV. to sfforeign iFEfj^^sionji. ADDRESS AT THE ANNUAL MEETING AT PITTSFIELD, 1891. THE VISION OF CHRIST THE INSPIRATION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS. Christian Brethren, and Friends : I had earnestly hoped, and confidently expected, that some one else would perform this office to-night, and that I should address you, if at all, only as one of the side speakers. Thus I was frequently wont to speak when our revered father and brother. Dr. Hopkins, filled this chair ; as I did, I remember, twenty-five years ago, in yonder church ; but the Board in its wisdom, or unwisdom, has decided otherwise. So far as this special service goes, I have no quarrel with that decision. It is always a delight to me to speak on the subject of foreign missions. No other theme which I ever meet so expands, uplifts, exhilarates the mind. We are here in the spirit of grati- tude and of hope. Looking back over four or five years, there have been great advances in the number of the men and women who are testifying for the Master as our representatives among men, in the pecuniary resources and the fruitful work of the Board throughout the world. Since we met here twenty-five years ago there has been a still vaster advance. Four or five years after that meeting the stream, then one, divided into two currents. Each of these has gone on by itself, and each has be- come a majestic stream, a river of love and light and power for all the world. But we are not here to-night simply to review and rejoice in the past. It is the instinct of Christianity always to point forward. Wherever the individual has the first feeble purpose to serve God, there begins the process in the result of which he must con- secrate all his life and powers to Him. The incipient faith points to the celestial vision ; the first pulsation of love to the perfect 76 THE VISION OF CHRIST affection of sanctification ; the primal peace to the serene and immortal felicity. Thus it is that earth prophesies Heaven ; that the first fruit of grace in man grows and blooms to immortality. So it is with every Christian institution of charity that I have known. Each desires ampler and more complete equipment, and better power for better work. So it is with our colleges ; with the college here in Berkshire County, which has become famous in the world. It will celebrate its centennial in two years. I remember having been present, and having heard Dr. Hopkins' discourse, at its semi-centennial in 1843. I remember how joyful Dr. Hopkins was when in 1 844 or 1 845 Amos Lawrence gave the college $15,000. Now that sum would seem by no means im- mense. The present college may appear to some amply equipped ; it has superb grounds and buildings, a rich library, many depart- ments, I suppose large funds ; yet I do not doubt that President Carter thinks he knows just where a million and a half, or two millions more, could be at once most wisely used. So it is with all Christian institutions. Growth and expansion are native to them all, because the life of God is in them. So it has been with the Church itself ; always aspiring, from the cata- combs to the throne ; from the small school, or the no-school, to the great university ; from the few converts at Corinth or Rome, to the vast and cultured populations of Christendom. So it is with foreign missions, which are only the Church Militant : Chris- tianity in action. The Church Militant is ever looking on to becom- ing the Church Triumphant. The Board, by the instinct which essentially belongs to it, must ever increase its work. It will never be satisfied with what it has done. It will always be of Paul's mind : " Not as though I had already attained, either were already perfect; but forgetting the past, I press forward toward the prize." And the question which continually meets us is. How is this progress to be secured ? As I have sat in these meetings, and heard the excellent papers on the work, the diapason thundering beneath every thought has been, How shall we raise the resources for our needs? There is money enough in the country, and in the churches. Meetings like this are good, but their effects are after all local and personal. On what shall we depend in the THE INSPIRATION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS. 77 minds of Christians for steadfast support, and an ever-enlarging increase of power for grander work ? First, there must be a clear discernment of the aim which the Board has before it : to make the heavenly life, in its felicity and wisdom, universal throughout the world. The spiritual work is always primary and sovereign. All other benefits come in sure sequence. Social and secular progress must be seen to follow the Christian Gospel by even the blindest. An infidel, who reads the papers of to-day, cannot but see it. Where the Bible goes, schools go, more charming and stately houses, literatures, the useful arts, as a matter of course. Where the sense of personal relationship to God through Christ is inspired, there is quick- ened a wholly new sense of human dignity, and right. Men quarrel with the statement that every man shall give account of himself unto God. It is, in fact, God's testimony to the royalty of human nature; the message of deliverance from earthly thral- dom ; the charter of individual independence, as toward human institutions. Christianity is to be the architect of the new earth, and to fill the world with light and liberty. Every statesman, and forecasting publicist, is most seriously bound to take account of that continuing and invincible fact. The spread of the Gospel is demanded by its economic effects, and if only for these it would repay our largest effort. But our aim is far more vital and vast than this, toward sub- limer and diviner effects. It is to brighten humanity by making the heavenly temper universal among men ; to make every house on earth a Christian home, and every community a Christian community, — a unified, vital, social organization. Do you say this is " a day-dream of the devout ! " But remember that every- thing in the world grandest in its history has been first a day- dream, and only long afterward an accomplished fact. " Paradise Lost" was a day-dream before it was a poem. St. Peter's was a day-dream before Angelo hung the Pantheon in the air. So was the unification of Italy, a free Church in a free State ; the aboli- tion of slavery ; the first missions ; the Reformation. The ideal is the only thing which under the rule of God is sure to be real- ized in the on-going history of mankind. It has been the ideal yS THE VISION OF CHRIST in God's mind, from the outset, that the heavenly life should finally become the dominant experience throughout the earth, until earth and Heaven shall blend at the horizon, and the heavenly Jerusalem, descending out of Heaven from God, shall appear among men. This issue is coming, in the end. The stupendous majesty of the ideal is its immortal guaranty. It is no more cer- tain that sunshine and rain, and the silver multitudes of the dew, will paint flowers and ripen the autumn grain and orchard fruits, than that Christian missions will have this majestic outcome. We may not hope to see the final effect from earthly levels ; but we shall see them from celestial lands, and may humbly and joyfully say : " I struggled for these, with all my will, in spirit and in prayer." Secular progress is bearing on this magnificent consummation, we do not by any means realize how fast. When the first mis- sionary letter came to this country from India, in 171 7, it came to Cotton Mather, directed to him at " Boston, West Indies." It came from the first Protestant European missionary in Asia — I think, a Moravian. Mather answered it, and sent also a gift of money and books, contributed, it is believed, by Harvard College. A significant fact to us is that his letter and gifts were fourteen months in reaching India. The missionary who had first written had died before they reached his station. To-day, less than a month would be needed. To-day, China and Japan are nearer this place than Nova Scotia was then. This village (as it was twenty-five years since), this prosperous and delightful city of to- day, is almost in touch with the Pacific Islands. All this has a magnificent moral significance. All the inventions and explora- tions of the age are to be of use in the advancement of the one Divine World-Religion. Railways saved this nation in the Civil War. Railways, telegraphs, presses, mines, with the Ameri- can spirit behind them, have hfted it to leadership among the republics of the world. They have made possible, also, on the Continent of Europe, a power of public opinion which shapes policies, governs governments, which the Czar himself feels, which the Pope discerns and seeks to guide and control. And these same physical instruments bear mightily on the advance of Christ's THE INSPIRATION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS. 79 kingdom. Do not mistake me. They are merely instruments of spiritual progress. They no more directly produce it than glasses give wisdom, or crutches strength. But we are to use them with a just sense of their moral relations, and their spiritual signifi- cance. When Columbus picked up this hemisphere out of the seas on the way, as he thought, to India, in more than one sense he opened the way to a New World. When, next year, we cele- brate his discovery, we shall almost hear the chimes of the new era ringing in the air. As we think how the Divine interposition has appeared in the development of affairs in our own country, we should have as perfect a confidence in Providence as we have that the universe will not split, or the stars fall from their poise. Then we shall feel ourselves moving in the line of the march of God's cosmical purpose. Then we shall see that such national changes, and such physical instruments, are the Divine levers to lift the race for- ward. They are the revolving wheels beneath Messiah's throne ; the wings and trumpet of the angel who shall proclaim to all the earth the message of immortal love ! Then an indestructible courage will be in us, and we shall already forecast the future. What the whole trend of the world's movement points to may be stayed, but it cannot possibly be brought to naught. But our great need, the great need of all Christians, is the ever- clearer discernment of the Son of God as leader in this mighty work. We need this vision of God in Christ. The martyrs had it — Irenaeus, Perpetua, and all the others ; that slave girl, Blan- dina, who, as Renan says, destroyed slavery and emancipated her sex, by fearless endurance of excruciating tortures. The foremost missionaries of our own time have had it. We have seen it our- selves reflected from the faces of the dying, and from the eyes and lips of the living. In this vision of the Lord is to be our chiefest and constant inspiration to missionary work ; not in theological doctrine alone, important as that is, but in such doc- trine unified, vitalized, glorified, in the cross and crown of Christ ; not in altruistic sentiments of charity, useful as these may be in their place ; but in such sentiments ingenerated by Christ, made passionate by him, and pushed into action for his sake. Of 8o THE VISION OF CHRIST course many things militate to-day against our attainment of this vivid and transforming view of God in Christ. Our life is rapid, crowded with affairs, intensely occupied with multitudes of cares ; there is little room for meditation and prayer. But we are helped, on the other hand, by the widening and more attentive study of the story of the evangelists. Christ in history appears more distinctly with every year. The churches, too, begin to recognize that their great need is unity in Christ. It will not come through external organizations, whose ulti- mate effect is mechanical, not moral. It will not come through bishops, whatever their titles may be, or their ornamented vest- ments. I certainly have great expectation concerning that mag- nificent Christian man and teacher consecrated yesterday in Boston. I have not the slightest doubt that the aim of his work, and its effect, will be to advance unity, spiritual power, a grander progress among all the churches in this State ; and I no more anticipate that he will condescend, as some others have done, to fanciful puerilities of dress than that one of your grand Berkshire elms will put on pantalettes ! But it is in Christ, alone, that we are to gain true unity in the Church, with a commanding, inspiring zeal ; and this appears where we may not always have thought to look for it. No man here is further from Roman Catholicism than I, yet I often pick up CathoHc prayer books and turn to the Golden Litany, to which all other litanies seem comparatively superficial and weak. Of course, I cannot repeat it verbally, but some of its petitions are instantly recalled : " By the cold crib in which thou didst lay, have mercy upon us ; By thy flight into Egypt, and all the pains thou didst suffer there ; By thy holy bap- tism, and the glorious appearing of the Holy Trinity; By thy thirst, hunger, cold and heat, in this vale of misery ; By thy won- derful signs and miracles ; By the inward and great heaviness which thou hadst when praying in the Garden ; By the spitting on thee, and the scourging; By thy purple garments, and thy crown of thorns ; By the nailing of thy right hand to the cross, and the shedding of thy most precious blood ; By the nailing of thy left hand, and that most holy wound, — purge, enlighten, and reconcile us to God ! By the lifting up of thy most holy body THE INSPIRA TION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS. 8 I on the cross ; By the bitterness of thy death, and its intolerable pains; By thy glorious resurrection, in body and soul; By thy wonderful and glorious ascension ; Have mercy upon us ! For the glory, and the Divine Majesty and Virtue of thy Holy Name, save us, and govern us, now and ever ! " I read these sentences with others, from this marvelous Litany, and I touch the flaming heart of all that has been best in the Roman Catholic Church. I cease to be amazed by the heroic self-devotion of Francis of Assisi, of Xavier, or of Raymond LuUy. We need the same vision of God in Christ. There only do we face that element of self-sacrifice which in Him is eternal and supreme. God suffered no self-sacrifice in planning the universe, or set- ting the stars in their places, or giving the seas their bounds. But when he gives up his Son for the redemption of the world, we see how much he cares for us ! When we know this unspeak- able self-sacrifice, what a joy it is to be a co-worker with God ! What a magnificent courage is born within us, which fears no ob- stacle, quails at no danger, and marches always to the sound of the enemy's cannon ! This time is critical ; as much so as when the barbaric hordes, your ancestors and mine, came down upon Rome ; as critical as when this continent was settled. It is a vastly critical time in the progress of Christ's kingdom, with all the world uprising before us, with wealth enough, and men enough to meet the need, with only the Spirit to use them want- ing. Let us settle it in our minds, dear friends, that the world is not to be converted to God by good people sitting in pews and listening to sermons, even the best, or sitting in rocking-chairs and reading good books. The work is vast, difficult, but pos- sible ; a work that calls for the labor of enthusiasm, for prayer and tears, for sweat-drops, and perhaps, for blood-drops. Con- tributions of money are not enough. Our very life must be in it, in the temper of the Divine self-sacrifice ! But what a privilege and joy thus to work in it, with God himself, and all the saintliest spirits of the earth, now and aforetime ! Is it not the grandest testimony to the magnificence of human nature that God has made us co-workers, not in the primary work of creation, but in 82 THE VISION OF CHRIST. the far grander work of redeeming the world ! In this work we can make our lives luminous in this world, and bright forever with a celestial glory in the next. Dear friends, may God bring us, with all our souls, to this work now, and to that crown hereafter ! and unto Him be all the praise ! V. iS>\xt Countr^'jS Cttbute to tl^e motW^ CftifU?atton* ADDRESS AT THE ANNUAL MEETING AT CHICAGO, 1892. OUR COUNTRY'S TRIBUTE TO THE WORLD'S CIVILIZATION. My Dear Christian Friends: It is too often my misfortune to be called upon for this annual address at the end of a day, or of several days, constantly occupied with matters claiming close attention, and so to come before those whom I have the honor and pleasure to address, with tired voice, with brain somewhat weary, and with every nerve shivering under the weight which it has had to carry. And this day has been to me, as you know, perhaps, one of specially exacting and exhausting duties ; so that I feel myself quite unfit to present to you this evening such trains of thought as I have in my mind, in the way in which I should have been glad to present them. But there were some things suggested to me the other day by the very brilliant and generous address of welcome to the Board which was made by one of your city pastors, which have had an interest to my own mind, and may perhaps have to some of yours. When Dr. Gunsaulus spoke of the meeting of the Board in this city this year as a fitting prelude to the great Columbian Exposition, which you are about soon to dedicate, I felt that he had, perhaps, in the ardor of his generosity, done us too much honor ; that it was bringing a comparatively small thing into association with that which is to be magnificent in its extent, in the variety which will belong to it, and in the splendor which will be its own. Yet, as I have thought of it since, I have felt that there was a more direct connection than I had at first apprehended between the two events — the coming of the American Board to Chicago, and the opening of this great Exposition of the world's industry and production. For the discovery of this continent was not only a sublime event in human history, by which that history has always since been essentially modified, but it was an event which came 86 OUR COUNTRY'S TRIBUTE in the Divine Providence, not by accident, not simply through the enterprise and courage of an individual man. It was not an unrelated event. It went back in its relations for at least 400 years, as long a period as has intervened since its accomplish- ment. It went back, certainly, to the initiation of the Crusades, at the end of the eleventh century, at the Council of Clermont, under the Pontificate of Urban II. For there, and in the move- ments of Crusade which followed for almost 200 years, Europe and Asia were brought face to face, as they never had been before. The mind of Europe was expanded, and its knowledge of the East was immensely increased. Thence came the impulse to travel in the East, on the part of Marco Polo and others, after the Crusades, in order to ascertain more particularly the characteristics of that till then almost unknown part of the world. We are not to forget that it was in his effort to reach beyond the Atlantic to the lands which Marco Polo and others had visited and described, that Columbus picked up this continent on the way. It was an event which, as I need not say, has had immense relations to all the subsequent civilized history on either side of the ocean. It gave vast stimulus to the entire European mind, wherever the tidings of the marvelous discovery were carried. In the nature of the case it must have done this ; for it was as if the moon were to be dropped to-night within twenty miles of our streets, and we were to be put in communication with it ! Here was another hemisphere, on this side of the water, brought to the recognition and attention of Europe, with its strange natural scenery, with its strange natural products, with its strange dusky figures flitting across the landscapes that loomed dimly before the European eyes. No other force so educational has belonged to any physical fact since the destruction of the Roman Empire, under the Germanic hosts. No event can occur, now or hereafter, in the history of the world, that can exert so stimulating a power upon those to whom the knowledge of it is brought. It was as if we were enabled now, sailing safely through the air, to encompass the globe on our flight within twenty hours, and make ourselves familiar, by immediate personal inspection, with every part of it in that space of time. Therefore there came naturally, not artifi- TO THE WORLD'S CIVILIZATION. 87 daily, in sequence from the amazing discovery, the great reforma- tion of religion in the following century. The relations between the two events, the one physical and the other moral, are still possible to be traced in a degree, although they cannot now be fully interpreted. Every movement in Europe, toward expanded enterprise, toward widened and augmented liberty, toward more general education, has had relation as well to that immense and sovereign fact. On this side of the ocean, of course, we know that everything in the way of civilized progress has been conditioned upon that event. The civilization of the Old World immediately began to be transported to the New ; and this nation of ours, which is almost entering the last quarter of its third century, was absolutely conditioned upon that discovery. The hour struck, then, of the new era in the world history, when land was sighted after the toil- some and perilous voyage. This nation came into existence from the thought of God then, as it evidently had been purposed by his forecasting mind long before our ancestors settled upon these shores. So this event which you are to celebrate in this great Exposi- tion a week or two hence, when it is to be dedicated, and months hence when it is to be opened, is only to be interpreted, either religiously or philosophically, as an immense sudden step forward in the movement of Divine Providence towards the final ideal for the world. It is to be lifted out of all the lower relations 'in which we are accustomed to regard it, and to be set, enthroned and glorious, in that scheme of Divine Providence which is steadily and majestically accomplishing its purpose for the earth. There is an ideal in the divine mind concerning the world and the race of mankind. We cannot doubt it, for it shines before us on both the Testaments of the Bible, — as clearly in the Old Testament as in the New. That magnificent ideal comprehends every inter- est and every individual of the human race. It looks for individ- ual souls made perfect in wisdom and love and holy charity, in heavenly aspiration and celestial purpose. It looks for every household to be filled with the light and power and beauty of the Christian faith. It looks for whole nations dwelling in righteous- 88 OUR COUNTRY'S TRIBUTE ness within their own borders, and so in peace and in charity toward all other nations associated with them. It looks toward a redeemed and reconciled race, perfected in the beauty of holiness, consecrated to the divine service, and passing from the earth, which it blesses and adorns, to the heavens which open to receive it. This is the ideal of God concerning the earth and mankind ; and the very majesty and purity, the luminous vastness of it, are proof of the truth that the Scripture, in which it is presented to us, has come from God. The Egyptian reared the pyramids, and wrought the colossal Sphinx ; he accomplished great architectural works, and was learned in the ancient wisdom. The Greek was cultured, full of fine fancy, full of noble faculty. The Roman had the power to conquer the world, and subdue all armed opposition to himself. But neither the Greek, nor the Roman, nor the Egyp- tian, ever conceived this supreme ideal of a holy race on a puri- fied earth. Each of them looked to an imperfect race in the consummation of history, over which their power might be exerted, into which their ideas might be infused, more or less fully, but which would remain imperfect and fragmentary to the end of time. Here is the one ideal, supreme and sublime, which looks to a regenerated race, on a regenerated planet. Where did it come from? From among those Jewish people who were exiled from Egypt, who were untouched by Greek culture, who were simply beaten into the dust by the Roman Empire, who were almost wholly excluded from any control of the world. Where did they get it ? Do you tell me they found it in their own wisdom and wit? You might as well tell me that the Par- thenon, the most majestic structure of the noblest architecture of the world, its consummate flower, was built by monkeys. You might as well tell me that the Iliad came from the croaking of frogs ; that yonder sun, in whose glory we have been rejoicing all these days, was built and gilded in some human workshop, and shunted into space through a side window. No ; it came from God, and could have come from no one else. I do not care for the higher criticism, or the lower criticism, or the intermediate criticism, or any other sort of criticism. When I look at this supreme ideal in the ancient Scripture, I know that the divine TO THE WORLD'S CIVILIZATION. 89 mind was in it, and that it comes to illuminate us from the Spirit who is the source of all light and power in the universe. Then it is in the light of this majestic ideal that we are to inter- pret the whole gospel. Here it finds its illustration and explica- tion to our minds. I never marvel that men of the world, men looking from the base-line of philosophical analysis, find it diffi- cult, and perhaps impossible, to accept the marvelous stories of the New Testament. The Incarnation of the Son of God, the mira- cles so familiarly accomplished by him, the tone of authority in which he revised the ancient law, his suffering on the cross, his resurrection from the grave and ascension into heaven, the subse- quent coming of the Holy Ghost at Pentecost, — I admit that, looked at without reference to the end to be accomplished, these things are too superlatively great to be, I had almost said con- ceived, certainly to be understood, perhaps too great to be accepted. But I look at all this work with reference to the sub- lime end to be accomplished, and I expect thenceforth the element of miracle to enter into it. We frame a vast and power- ful engine for vast and mighty work. We do not expect to tunnel the mountains with a watch spring ; we do not expect to drive a steamboat over the sea with a jet of gas. These are useful in their place, and for their purpose ; but we want the mighty engine when the mighty work is to be performed, when the way is to be tunneled through the roots of the mountains, along which the commerce and the travel of the world may follow. We want the mighty engine, when we are to drive the tremendous hull across the sea, trampling the riotous waves into a floor, and making the distant port with the certainty almost of the stars in their courses. We do not build a palace for the nursery, but we build it for the great imperial councils and pageantries which are to be associated with it. You have not built yonder stately struc- tures on the lake shore for a kindergarten, or a machine shop. You have erected them to house in them the treasures of the world, which are expected to come here next year. And so God, with this majestic ideal before his mind, gave a redemption ade- quate to the work to be accomplished by it. And when I think of the end, the whole amazing story of the Master is illumined to 90 OUR COUNTRY'S TRIBUTE my mind. There is not one miracle too many, there is not one sacrifice too vast, for the accomplishment of that illustrious divine plan. So all the subsequent movement of God in his providence on the earth is in like manner illumined to us, when we see towards what it has been from every direction converging. The formation of the Roman Empire, and the bringing of all peoples under one dominion, the breaking up of the Roman Empire before the Ger- manic hosts, and the formation of the Christian states of medieval and of modern Europe, — these take illustration, and illumination, from this vast plan of the Most High. In later times, the bring- ing of India under British rule, the lifting of Australia toward the independent Christian life and power which it is soon fully to attain, the opening of China and Japan and Africa, and the build- ing u{) of this nation for the purposes of God in the earth — a building-up only made possible by the discovery of this continent four hundred years ago — all these things illustrate to us God's intervention, silent but directive, mighty and irresistible, in the movement of human affairs toward the end to which I have referred, and which the Scripture so sublimely sets before us. There has been a sense of this in this nation, since the beginning. The fathers felt that they were sent here and planted, for a divine purpose and a divine work. The same conviction was in their spirits when they were facing the French and the Indians in those savage wars which scathed the frontier with fire, and drenched it with blood. The same tone speaks forth in the Revo- lutionary struggle. Men could not and would not give up that struggle, continued through seven years, and they would have protracted it through seventy years, if it had been necessary, because they felt that there was a purpose for the nation to accomplish, which could not be accomplished except through their success in that prolonged and fateful fight. The same thing is seen, as well, in the sudden wiping out of slavery in this coun- try, in the sudden building up of a vast Christian empire along the shores of the Pacific. All God's purposes in providence have been converging towards the result which he indicates to us in his ancient Scripture. As one train starts from northern Wis- TO THE WORLD'S CIVILIZATION. 9 1 consin, another from Minnesota, another from Missouri or Dakota, another from Kentucky, converging upon this magnificent city, though starting from different points, and pursuing courses not parallel with each other but sometimes seeming contradictory to each other, so God's movements in providence have all been converging on that result which is ever before his eternal mind. So it is that the discovery of this continent, as I have said, was a providential fact — immense, full of significance, vast in its relation to the progress of mankind, appearing properly at that precise time when it came to the knowledge of the world. I have no authority to commit this Board to anything, and I certainly do not wish to commit it on a question of history. But I can say for myself, not as President but as an individual, that I fully believe that the Northmen found this continent, and lived on it, half a millennium before Columbus ever discovered it or its outlying islands. [Applause.] But the knowledge of the conti- nent thus acquired was mysteriously wrenched back from the European mind. It lives in the Icelandic sagas, and in some of the stories and songs of the Norwegians ; but Europe at large failed to retain the fact in its memory or thought. As far as I know, it is the only great fact that has ever been brought to the human mind in Europe and elsewhere, which has suddenly and mysteriously been withdrawn from it, and no more retained. The time had not come ; the printing press was not here ; the era immediately preceding the Reformation had not arrived ; and so God plucked back that stupendous fact from the knowledge of Europe, that it might wait to be made clear, again, after the pre- liminary preparations had been completed. Then it came to light ; and so God's providence was shown to us vividly, visibly one might almost say, in the discovery when it was made. Now that has had relation, as I have said, to all subsequent history, in Europe and in this country. It has had its immense bearing on the entire development of God's plan for the world ; and especially it has given direction to this nation, which he so marvelously planned, so wonderfully trained, and has so wonder- fully enriched, in order that he might make it a nation to his praise and honor in all the earth. 92 OUR COUNTRY'S TRIBUTE And so the question comes to us with instant urgency, What have we done, as a nation, for the fulfillment of this divine plan ? for carrying out the purposes manifested in the discovery of the continent at the point when it was brought to light? Well, we have done some things. We know what the political influence of this nation has been — how it reached into France, for exam- ple, which sent help to us in our struggle with Great Britain. We know how the spirit of liberty went back into France, and quick- ened there the revolution, and finally the French Republic of the present day, which we all pray may be more and more purified from error and from vice, and made as permanent as the conti- nent itself. [Applause.] We know how the same influence reached down into Brazil, and really swept out of his throne there the best monarch who ever reigned or lived on American soil, in either part of the hemisphere. We know how it extended into Italy ; how it has reached even, fitfully and intermittently, into Spain, We know the political influence extended in the world by our example of prosperity and power, and of freedom as the basis of both. We know something of our inventive influence, and of the industrial movements set in motion by this nation. The telegraph, the telephone, the typewriter, the sewing machine, the steam-plows and reapers which you know something of in Chicago and its neighborhood, the elevators that are pushing your city higher and higher towards the sun, — we know how these have gone into the world. We know how the sewing machine has liberated, to a degree, the female sex from the labors which were so onerous and so incessant in other years, and in other lands as well as ours. We know something of the commercial influence of this country : $845,000,000 of exports, and 1^790,000,000 of imports, is the record for two years ago. How much that means ! How many ships it implies, set in motion on every sea, how much of the stir of industry and traffic in every civilized land to which commerce and travel reach ! We know all these things; and we know as well — what is better than any of these effects — the moral effect which has gone out from this nation. This is the supreme thing — the moral effect. It is very exhilarating, no doubt, to see the headlines in TO THE WORLD'S CIVILIZATION. 93 the newspapers, "Another victory for American Pork ! " [Laugh- ter.] But it is a great deal more exhilarating to thoughtful men to see some intimation of another victory for the American spirit in other lands [applause] — that spirit which belongs to this nation, and which, by our life as well as by our direct activity, we may make general in the world. Some things have certainly been done in this direction of moral effect. I count as a magnificent thing the essential purity of American literature. No doubt there are many mean and dis- gusting stories manufactured and sold on our shores, but the prevalent tone of our literature is that of purity. There is very little of that salacious stuff which belongs to the French nude school, or to that class of literature represented by German schemes of the " Elective Affinities." The authors known and read in this country, and known and read in other countries as belonging to America, are models of manly and womanly virtue and purity — men like Irving, Cooper, Bancroft, Prescott, Emer- son, Hawthorne, Bryant, Longfellow, and Lowell ; men like those who have lately died, — Whittier, the Quaker poet, whose verses march like the tread of battalions, and over whose shining stanzas ring notes of war and peans of victory ; Curtis, who lately died, a dear friend of mine for many years, firm, gentle, chivalric, knightly, in every fiber of his being. These, with Mrs. Stowe, of unsur- passed genius, and a great many others who are still living among us, represent American literature. Now it is a great thing to have a literature which all the world can recognize as beautiful by reason of its purity, and by reason of the temper of fidelity to truth which everywhere pervades it. It is a great thing that we may know and say that whoever inhales the air of American liter- ature, inhales an atmosphere without a secret poison in it. Then it is a great thing to have made evident to the world the beauty, dignity, and power, which belong to womanhood. You remember that when our first missionaries crossed the ocean, and were refused by the British Government liberty to land in India, the two principal doctrines of the Hindu were the sanctity of the Cow and the depravity of Woman ! In this country woman has bad her freest share of privilege, influence, and personal right, 94 OUE COUNTRY'S TRIBUTE from the beginning. Woman stands signally before our thoughts whenever we look back to the landing of the Pilgrims on Plym- outh shore ; and women have been illustrious in our annals from that day to the present. Our boards of education are open to them. A thousand forms of occupation, that were utterly un- known until this nation had come to its development, besides manifold professional activities, are open to them. They have their magnificent leadership in all social reform movements ; in all movements, in fact, in which they deign or delight to take part. They ought to have. The imaginative geographers have some- times said that while the Old World, broad and massive, repre- sents the masculine element of the earth, the new hemisphere, more delicate and shapely in its outline, figures the feminine form on the globe. We may remember that it was by Isabella's patronage that Columbus was sent upon his way ; that it was by Elizabeth's patronage that the first English colonies were estab- lished in this country. Two women did more than any others towards the development of everything that has been conditioned here upon that discovery. The fact is, the women own this country [laughter and applause], and my only wonder is that they let the men live in it ! [Renewed laughter.] Again, how much has been done for the world by the manifes- tation of national respect for universal education. It has been supposed of course, for centuries, and in many lands, and is so now, that education unfits the common people for the simpler avo- cations of life, and for the submission and obedience to authority which will make that hfe tranquil. In this country the rule has been to educate, from the beginning ; and it was never more energetically and fully carried out than it is at this time. The 13,000,000 children in our public schools, between the ages of four and twenty-one, the 1^133,000,000 annually devoted to this public education, the 400 colleges, the multitude of professional and technical schools, the uncounted multitude of the higher sem- inaries and of the noble private schools existing in the land — all show the American respect for education ; and that brings to us our tranquillity and prosperity. You, who are voting citizens here, will cast your votes pretty soon for the officers of the government, TO THE WORLD'S CIVILIZATION. 95 for the ensuing four years. You know beforehand that whichever party is victorious in electing its candidates, these candidates will be installed in their places without a sign of disturbance in any part of the land. How comes this ? Why is it not so in Central or South America? It comes from the prevalent — one might almost say the universal — education of the people. They are taught to know their rights. And this silent and quiet transfer of political power over an immense area, and for sixty odd millions of people, is to be accomplished as quietly as the lighting or extinguishing of the lamps in this or any other hall or church in Chicago. All this tranquillity, all this prosperity, comes from this general education ; and the example elevates the value and dig- nity of popular education before the eyes of the world. Then, it is a great thing to have the American spirit of intre- pidity manifested as it has been. It is a lesson especially to those who are dwelling in darkness and in fear, to the desponding and the despairing peoples of the earth. Again and again men have said to me in Europe, " I believe you Americans are not unwill- ing to attempt anything ! You are ready to face any danger ; you are ready to conquer any obstacle ; you tunnel and channel the Rocky Mountains, until there are no mountains left. You go through a tremendous civil war, and then dissolve your army into the national life until it ceases to be recognized ; you confront the great problem of slavery and emancipation, and you conquer in that." "Well," I have said, "it is nothing but the American temper, which is a temper not audacious, not arrogant nor boast- ful, but thoroughly intrepid. We believe in the nation; we believe in God's assistance to every good work ; and we are not afraid to undertake any work, physical, social, or poUtical, which He puts in our way." It is that temper of intrepidity which brings representatives of all nations to our shores. They want to breathe the tonic ozone of the American atmosphere. So the catholicity of spirit in this American temper, as well, is a testimony to the world. It comes in part, I think, from the fact that we are all foreigners together, in one sense ; that is, our ancestors came here at a definite point in history, and have not lived here always, while other populations have been flowing in 96 OUR COUNTRY'S TRIBUTE Upon us with incessant and almost incredible rapidity. A gentle- man said this morning, in yonder church, that Chicago is the second Bohemian city of the world, in respect to Bohemian popu- lation. Well, I beUeve that New York — certainly it used to be, and I suppose it is so now — is the third German city in respect to the German population resident in it. It is said, you know, that there are one hundred languages spoken along the streets of New York. This great, intrepid, cosmopolitan American people has thus been signalizing its temper before the world, and pointing the way along which other peoples may march to magnificent suc- cesses. I hold it to be, therefore, a vast moral power which has been contributed from hence to the world at large. And, surely, there has been a great religious power going forth as well. The reverence for the Bible at which the infidel sneers, at which the man of the world sometimes smiles in derision, is really characteristic of our nation. Also that reverence for the Lord's Day, which lately constrained the National Congress to declare that the doors of your Exposition should be closed on the Lord's Day, from the beginning to the end. [Applause.] That could not have been done, I take it, in other nations of the world. Possibly it might have been done in England, but certainly not in France, and probably not in Germany. The reverence for the Bible, and the reverence for the Lord's Day, belong to our American life, and are characteristic of our nation in its prevailing spirit, purpose and temper. Then we have demonstrated, for the world to see it, the power of the church to take care of itself, without help or interference from the secular government of the nation in which the church is planted. That is a lesson which the world will more and more take to its heart. It has been thought, of course, for ages, that religious sentiment and religious doctrine cannot be maintained among a people except by the aid of state authority ; that the ministers of religion cannot be sustained except by the aid of state taxation. Our ancestors brought that idea with them, we know. Three immediate ancestors of mine, by blood, and in the ministerial office, were each of them settled in a church where TO THE WORLirS CIVILIZATION. 97 the pastor was called and the salary was raised in town meeting. We passed beyond that long ago ; and we have shown how power- ful religion is as a force in itself, without the least dependence upon state assistance. The 1 20,000 Protestant congregations in this country now, besides the 8,000 Catholic congregations, the immense amount of property invested in church institutions, the 13,000,000 communicants in Protestant churches — communi- cants multiplying every year in a ratio rising more rapidly than the ratio of the increase of the population at large — these show what the power of the Christian religion is, without any crutch of state assistance, and without any help or hindrance from state authority. That magnificent maxim of the great Italian states- man, " A free church in a free state," had its inspiration, as it has its illustration, in this nation of which we are part, and in whose history God's providence has been majestically manifest. [Ap- plause.] .. Then we have developed, as well, the power of the lay-element in the churches as it has never been known before. But 1 will not dwell upon that, it is so wholly familiar. Our most direct contribution to help the world forward, and lift it into larger freedom and light, has been in the work of Chris- tian missions. It is this work which stands in direct association with that great event in providence, the sudden discovery of this continent, and which merely carries toward its consummation and full exhibition the plan which was therein unfolded. This is a work not carried on by our Board alone, but carried on by num- bers of boards affiliated with us in affectionate sympathy and mutual confidence ; working along the same lines, toward the same end \ in the aggregate contributing scores of millions of dollars already to the world's evangelization ; sending out not only hundreds but thousands of consecrated men and women to assist in this work ; planting schools and printing presses, with hospitals and semina- ries for higher education, as well as native churches, in all parts of the earth ; lifting savage tribes on the rocky coral reefs that a little while ago were reeking with human gore, and echoing with shrieks of human fear or human victory, into civilized and Chris- tian commonwealths. This great work of Missions, which is fol- 98 OUR COUNTRY'S TRIBUTE lowing in the path of the divine commission, absolutely, and which is accomplished under the tuition and inspiration of the Holy- Ghost, sets our nation forward, and illustrates afresh the plan of God in bringing this continent to light at the moment when it came to the knowledge of civilized men, in building and keeping this nation here, and setting it forth on its sublime errand. This is a work in which the heart and mind of God must be engaged — have been engaged — from the very outset, since first he touched by the motion of the Spirit the individual hearts from which have come these far-extending missionary organizations. All this work, you observe, was conditioned on that fact of the discovery of this continent at the time when it was brought to the knowledge of the world. So I say again, that we are right in associating that magnificent Exposition which is to celebrate this great event with this meeting of our American Board, compara- tively unknown and unimportant, unattractive to the eyes of the world, as this meeting is when measured against the superb Exposition which is to be. My dear friends, let us never forget two things in the light of this course of thought, so rapidly and so imperfectly traced before you : One is, that progress must be gradual, toward that majestic consummation which shed its luster from afar on the eyes of the devout in what we call the semi-civilized tribes of Judea long ago ! Progress must be gradual. Men of the world sometimes say deri- sively that ours is very slow. " You say you have 30,000 converts. What are they among so many ? You have so many churches, and so many schools ; but after all, how little are they in such a vast multitu- dinous population as that of the world ? " Well, my friend, will you tell me what great and enduring effect has ever been realized in a short space of time ? What city was ever builded to its ultimate completeness in one year, or in ten years? Your growth here in Chicago has been phenomenally rapid, and yet you go back over half a century, and more, to see the beginnings of your city-life. Will you tell me what national literature was ever developed to its completeness in one generation, or in five? Will you tell me what government was ever established in equity and wisdom, even with the heroic efforts of men who gave their lives to its TO THE WORLD'S CIVILIZATION. 99 service, in one century or in two? Will you tell me what physi- cal continent was ever transformed from the rudeness of barbar- ism to the beauty of civilization in one century, or in five ? Great works imply, always, gradual progress ; and nothing is more pre- posterous than to suppose that this immense, surpassing work, which man says is too great ever to be accomplished, is to be accomplished within a few generations. Why, there has to be an interval of ages between the cave or the skin-tent, or the hemlock hut, and any one of our modernly equipped houses. There is an interval of ages between the first attempt at a song or a narrative and the completed literature which dates from that attempt. There is an interval of ages between the hollow log floating on the water, and the majestic steamship that unites the hemispheres. There is an interval of ages between these shores as they were when our ancestors landed here, and as they now are ; and the great Interior behind them has been subdued and cultivated through many successive generations, until now it blossoms in villages and in cities. Gradual progress, toward the mighty effect, is the law everywhere ; and we are simply foolish, we simply enter- tain the most preposterous notion that can come into the human mind, if we are offended because the expectation is not realized that in one year or in ten years, in one generation or in five gen- erations, the work of redeeming the world unto Christ, and puri- fying it into his holy beauty, is to be accomplished. But let us also never forget the final supreme fact, that God is behind this progress, and that it never will cease till God is dead ; — never while omnipotence has power ; never while the divine wisdom foresees the end from the beginning; never until the divine heart is turned to indifference or hostility toward his chil- dren on the earth. There is one banner that never goes down in any battle, and that is the banner of God's truth. There is one army that always marches to success, and that is the army of the Cross. God brought this continent to light at exactly the right moment ; he colonized this country with a Christian population, at exactly the right moment; he has carried us through all perils, and over every obstacle, to our present stage of national development and power, and of Christian culture ; and his arm is never weary. lOO OUR COUNTRY'S TRIBUTE. and his heart is never faint. It is as sure as that he lives that the result at last shall be accomplished, and the earth become the abode of his saints, visited with joy by angels, smiled upon by him who baptized it unto himself in water and in blood — in the tears which he shed, and in the blood which gushed from his heart ! This continent is not a dream ; it is a vast majestic fact in the constitution of the globe. That realization of God's plan to which this is to contribute is not a dream, not a reverie of the devout. It is a purpose of the Almighty, as certain to be accom- plished as the stars are to remain on their poise, as the constella- tions are to maintain their sublime and shining configurations. Let us be carried forward in all our work, for the nation and for the world, by this sublime certainty, that God is with us and the future is ours ! Let us never forget that in doing this work we strike hands with the discoverer whose work you are so soon and so grandly to celebrate ! We strike hands with martyrs, and with early teachers and apostles before them ; we strike hands with the missionaries who brought the gospel to our own savage ^ancestors, and out of painted pirates made them into subjects of God's Christian rule ; we strike hands with all that has been loveliest and noblest in all the past, and we reach forward to ages which we shall not see upon the earth. The humblest life becomes sublime wnen it takes hold upon God's plan, and helps to work it out. The noblest powers of earth take their supreme inspiration, their coronation and glory, from contributing to that divine plan. And that will be a joy to us when heaven is opened : that we may look back upon the earth and say, " I saw that purpose, and worked to accomplish it. I gave money and time, labor and life, to that supreme endeavor." That will be a joy which even the harps of saints cannot fully bear, and the lips of the redeemed cannot fully utter. The mag- nificent privilege of life is to take part in this work, to do it with our might, and do it unto the end. [Loud applause.] VI. Cl^e appeal of ^foreign jHijSjstonjsJ to OBujstnejsJjs CommunitiejJ* ADDRESS AT THE ANNUAL MEETING AT WORCESTER, 1893. THE APPEAL OF FOREIGN MISSIONS TO BUSINESS COMMUNITIES. Brethren of the American Board, Christian Friends : If there had not been very exceptional circumstances connected with the acceptance by the Vice-President and myself of the offices to which you have done us the honor to reelect us, I should not refer to that election ; but under the circumstances, it seems proper that I say a word or two in regard to it, and to our relation to it. Six years ago, when I was caught in the deadly grip between your judgment and will and my own strongly ad- verse preference, as you elected me to the Presidency of this institution, I said that I could accept it only on the condition that some way should be found in which we all might walk and work together as Christian brethren, trj-ing to advance the king- dom of the Lord on earth. That way I sought to outline in the letter of acceptance which I wrote a short time afterward, and which the Board did me the honor to adopt as a practical basis of administration two years later, at the meeting in New York. In that letter of acceptance there was not a hair-breadth of com- promise on the doctrinal position of the Board. A certain hypothesis, which had been presented as a tolerable hypothesis, was regarded by me, as it was by many others and as it still is by myself, as a dangerous dream of the human mind, unauthorized by the Scripture, almost certainly damaging to the souls of men. But I made the distinction, which I have made many times in the examination of candidates for license, or for ordination or installation, between that which a man thinks more or less loosely, and the man himself, or a doctrine positively and centrally held by him. Coleridge said, you remember, in words which I might I04 ^^-^ APPEAL OF FOREIGN MISSIONS not adopt in their full reach, but which have in them a great element of truth, " Tolerate no belief which you deem false and of injurious tendency, but arraign no believer. The man is more and other than his belief ; and God only knows how large or how small a part of him the belief in question may be." As I said, I might not perhaps adopt that in its full significance and reach, but I do apply it to many of the thoughts which now and then float into the mind, and float out again, of those who are meditating upon the mysterious and austere problems of the future life. I said, in the letter to which I have referred, that I thought this a just distinction; and that we were to estimate, carefully and critically, the spiritual force of any tendency which might appear in the candidate toward a doctrine which we could not endorse. As I understand it, the Board itself has adopted and applied precisely that principle, in the action which it took this morning. It recognizes that a man may be entangled in statements made by himself which he is not ready to repudiate, feeling perhaps that it would be unjust to his self- respect to do so, but which do not represent a part of his working theology. So it was said, truly, emphatically, that the recent action does not change in any degree the doctrinal basis of the Board. It believes, or hopes certainly, I think believes, that this man, whose work has been seen and known of men in Japan, who is commended to the Board by all the missionaries working in that empire connected with us, will work, precisely as I said at Chicago last year, as if he knew that the hypothesis which has interested his mind was not a reality but a dream. The Board has exercised this generous confidence in him. I trust, and I surely hope, that the result will justify this expectation. It has not changed in any degree the doctrinal basis of the Board, but it has given to this brother, laboring afar from us, and commending himself thus far by his work, the opportunity to labor in its service and under its commission, while he continues to labor in faithfulness and with zeal. This is what the Board has done and nothing else. I believe, firmly, in the correctness and the wisdom of each of the minutes adopted by the Prudential Committee, in April, and TO BUSINESS COMMUNITIES. I05 in June. I ought to, for I had some hand in shaping each of those minutes. I believe that we desired — I know we did — to appoint Mr. Noyes, as we stated in the first minute, setting forth the grounds upon which we could make the appointment. I believe, when subsequent declarations came from him to us, that it was not within the province of the committee to complete the appointment, but that it must be referred to the Board. I reaffirm both the positions in those minutes ; and nothing has been done which is inconsistent with them. The Board has only exercised its authority, which it had not delegated to the com- mittee, but which was perfectly within its own power all the time. Now a personal word, if you will allow it. I came to this city absolutely determined not to be reelected to the Presidency of the Board — simply upon personal grounds, and without the slightest reference to any action that might be taken, or might not be taken, in regard to this or to any other controverted sub- ject. Brethren, I have passed by two years the limit, which, under the unwritten law of this institution, applies in respect to the age of those who are in its service as its secretaries ; and I am perfectly conscious that the elasticity and the resilience of spirit which I had even ten years ago is not as complete in my experience to-day as it then was. You will remember that I have the care, constantly, of a large and important church upon my hands, without assistance in the church-work. You know, many of you, how tasking to the sympathies and how exacting to the intellectual power, in a preacher and pastor, is the work of a church. I came last week through the most tragic and glorious scenes that we ever meet on this side of the gates of pearl, — the sickness, terminating in the death, of a brilliant and beloved young man, married two years ago to a lady of my congregation, beloved by me, leaving his young wife and his infant child, and passing on in the victorious triumph of faith, yet amid the sadness and the tears of those around him, to the World Unseen. Twice, last week, I stood by the coffins of members of my congre- gation. You who are pastors know how that draws upon the very life of the spirit ; and I came here, after the Sunday services which I06 THE APPEAL OF FOREIGN MISSIONS followed, weary and sick. I have sat upon this platform with my head filled with pain, and my eyes almost blinded by the pain behind them, while the debates have been going on. Yet this is only one meeting at which I must be present. Other meetings come ; deliberations are to be conducted ; a large correspondence has to be carried on ; there are critical exigencies which must be met ; there are criticisms which must be encountered, and some- times in justice to the cause be answered ; and the pressure is greater than I felt that 1 could again take up. Therefore I deter- mined absolutely to resign, saying nothing about it until the letter was in the hands of the committee, but not withdrawing it on any condition. My dear and honored brother, the Vice-President, who has sat by my side and worked with me in this cause through all these years, had come here, without my knowing it, with the same purpose in his own mind. Pressed by the claims of a large private business, and by the claims of vast public trusts, as a trustee of great libraries and of many estates, he felt that he could not go on longer with this service ; and he had written his letter of resignation as I had written mine. Both of these letters went into the hands of the committee yesterday morning, as soon as we knew of whom the committee was to be composed. Neither letter had the least reference to any question coming before the Board. They were personal letters, written under the exigencies of personal experience, and claiming a relief which we felt that we had deserved and earned. At three o'clock this afternoon, after resisting every effort to persuade us to withdraw those letters, we learned, together, that there were other resignations which were to come, presumably on account of the action which had been taken by the Board this morning, in which action we individually and entirely concurred. We, therefore, instantly felt that our resignations, going out with the others, would imply, in spite of anything that could be said to the contrary, to the public mind, a dissatisfaction on our part with the action of the Board this morn- ing, which dissatisfaction did not exist. Therefore, not because we were unwilling to be misrepresented — we have borne that trial a good many times, and never fretted rO BUSINESS COMMUNITIES. lO/ or flinched — but because we thought damage might be done to the work of the Board to which we have given our years of serv- ice, and in whose ever-growing and more glorious prosperity our hearts are bound up, we at the last moment withdrew our resigna- tions, and now accept our election to the offices of President and Vice-President. [Loud and prolonged applause.] Now, brethren, let us have a time of peace ! [Loud applause.] You have appointed new members, largely, upon the Prudential Committee ; you have appointed a new secretary ; now let us all work together for the glory of the Master and his king- dom during all this year, as far as possible without complaint and without criticism. [Loud applause.] I remember an elo- quent Methodist divine, an old man who had been brought up and trained in an agricultural community, and who was accus- tomed, I presume, to use figures that suited that community, in whose church there was at one time a violent quarrel. In one of his prayers he was reported to have said : " O Lord, thou knowest that there will be puUings and haulings in our spiritual team, until we are all unharnessed and put up to fod- der in the stalls of eternal salvation." [Laughter.] But, he added, "O Lord, do grant us now a Uttle peace." [Laughter.] I say precisely that. We have not changed the doctrinal basis of the Board a bit. We have only called new men, to do the work which others felt reluctant to pursue ; and now, for the sake of the cause, for the sake of the Master, for the sake of the world, for the sake of our own souls, let us work together in this cause with a joyful and triumphant energy that shall bring us at the end of the year to a treasury so filled, to such a harmony and unity of counsel, and to such a work at home and abroad, as the Board has never known. [Loud applause.] Well, you expect me to say some words at any rate on the general subject of Foreign Missions, and I am always glad to do that. One of the Chicago newspapers last year, I remem- ber, was responsible for the story that when a man and his wife from one of the outlying wards of Chicago — about one hundred and fifty miles, I believe, from the center of the city [laughter] — were passing a placard on the street, they saw I08 THE APPEAL OF FOREIGN MISSIONS in large letters, two feet tall, "A. B. C. F. M." "Why, John," said his wife, "what do you suppose those letters stand for?" " Well, Jennie, I don't really know, unless perhaps it 's because they can't sit down." [Laughter and applause.] Well, I always feel a difficulty in sitting down, and a great facility in standing up, when the subject of foreign missions comes before my thought, and is to be presented before an audience. We can none of us have heard, I am sure, that magnificent discourse on last Tuesday evening, without feeling the grandeur and sublimity of the aim which is contemplated in the work of the foreign mis- sions, — the aim for individual souls, and the aim for the world at large. It concerns the grandest things in God, — not his power and his authority only, but the character in him, of wisdom and love, which gives sublimity to his omnipotence, and without which that omnipotence would be a continual and terrific menace to the universe. It concerns God in his greatest work — greater than that of creation, greater than that of swinging yonder con- stellations in their mighty rhythm through the silent skies, — the work of Redemption by which the human soul, defiled and igno- rant, is to be lifted into fellowship with God, through his Son and by his Spirit, and to be made the partaker here, and the full heir hereafter, of the glory and honor and immortality which are beyond the grave. You remember that that magnificent man, Phillips Brooks, as I always love to call him. Bishop Brooks of this diocese of Massachusetts, said once, when he was asked in London, " What sermon are you to preach before the Queen?" "What sermon? There is only one sermon ! " Ah, his meaning was, I am sure, that God in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself, is to be the substance and scope of every sermon ever preached from a Christian pulpit; and he, when his work was done, went up to see the great results of that resplendent work, in the circles of the immortals, before God's throne. That is the aim of foreign missions, — to bring this poor, timid, sin- ful human spirit into alliance and fellowship with the Divine mind on high and with the Divine heart, and to cover the earth, bloody as it is, defiled as it is, ragged and torn as it is by strifes of war, with the kingdom of righteousness and of TO BUSINESS COMMUNITIES. IO9 peace, and of joy in the Holy Ghost. It is a work which not merely exalts the mind, it positively dilates it, when it enters into our clear and inspiring thought. It is a work the contemplation of which opens all history to us, opens all human life here and beyond to our thought — a work that lifts us into the closest sympathy with Christ on his cross, in his ascension, and on his throne ; a work which brings the sublimities and mysteries of the eternal counsel of God to enwrap and enkindle our contemplating minds. You have been, many of you, up the long stairways leading to the dome of St. Peter's ; and you remember how you cHmbed along those darkened passages until, at last, you suddenly stepped upon the floor of the lantern, when out of the darkness you passed into the sunshine, and all the scene opened before you at a glance, — the great Campagna, the Alban and the Sabine Hills, with off in the west the flash of the Mediterranean, under perhaps the sunset splendors. So it is when we rise to the summit of this great theme. All history opens, and all the gospel opens, and all the eternity to come opens before us. That is our work, and it is the educational work of the church. I have often thought that there is the secret of the reason why God leaves it to us to do, and does not send his ministering angels, and does not write his law and promise in letters of lightnings, lucid and not frightful, on the glowing heavens. He leaves it to us to carry his messages, that we may be enriched and expanded, newly empowered, in mind and spirit, by doing the Divine Work in the world. It is the great educational force of civilization itself. It is that which trains civilization for its noblest office among men. So to this let us be dedicated here, afresh — dedicated for all these years to come, dedicated as long as we live on earth, and dedi- cated more than ever when we pass through the gates of light, and are with the saints who have gone before. But I remember that I am speaking in the midst of a com- munity which is occupied largely and properly in practical affairs, and where men and women sometimes say, and perhaps oftener think, " Well, this is all very sublime, beautiful to think of ; and I lO THE APPEAL OF FOREIGN MISSIONS for the church, and for spiritual circles, and for ourselves in high spiritual moods, it is a delightful and elevating subject of con- templation. But foreign missions have no direct practical rela- tions to us, to our daily life, to our business affairs, to our enter- prise and commerce, and prosperity in the world. And even if they had, the enterprise is too vast to be carried through by the instruments which Christian men have in their hands. It is like trying to tunnel a mountain with a glass auger ; it is like trying to conquer the ocean by sending out birch canoes upon it, to undertake to conquer the world to Christ by sending out a mis- sionary here, and a missionary there, and putting the Scriptures into this barbarous dialect and the other." Now let us look at this a minute. I am speaking not merely to those who are accustomed to high contemplations, and who are satisfied with their spiritual vision of that which God purposes for us, and calls upon us to do, but I am speaking to those en- gaged in practical affairs, who want to know how foreign missions are related to them. Then, my friends, let us at least distinctly recognize the fact that everything we have in the world which is precious to us, as having in it a Christian element, has come from the work of foreign missions ! You know how that work began in the early time, and was carried on to the Roman, to the Greek, to the Egyptian, to the Babylonian, to Spain and Gaul and Britain, to the Slavs and the Avars and the Finns, and all the others. It was by that work of foreign missions that our pagan ancestors were evangelized, and turned from rapacious pirates into peaceful subjects of organized commonwealths. It was from that work that we have received whatsoever we have that makes life beau- tiful to us. Every church, every college, every hospital, every Christian home, rests upon that work of foreign missions. Every institution in this city, famous as it is for its institu- tions, and for its manifold outreaching enterprise, rests upon the basis of foreign missions ; from the humblest kindergar- ten, up to the great university munificently endowed by one of your citizens. Yonder hospital for the insane, famous in all the country, rests upon foreign missions. All Christian litera- ture and all Christian art, all the serenities and the prosper- TO BUSINESS COMMUNITIES. I I I ities and the festivities of domestic life, rest upon foreign mis- sions. Every library comes from foreign missions, and every effort that is humane in its character or Christian in its scope comes from the same. Every bank, every counting-room, as well as the hospital and the home, has an influence upon it from for- eign missions. All mechanical industry took its first and sublim- est consecration in the world when the Divine hands, that sub- mitted afterward to be nailed to the cross, and that now hold the keys of empire on the earth, took up and handled and skillfully used the humble instruments in the carpenter's shop at Nazareth. [Applause.] That gave consecration to industry ; that made it glorious and beautiful in the sight of Christian men, as in the sight of angels, and of God himself. Now let us recognize the fact that we did not make ourselves enlightened, industrious and successful, any more than the Greeks and Romans, who were nobler than we are in some respects of natural constitution, made themselves free and Christian. We inherit a Christian Civilization : that is the whole story in a single word ; and that Christian civilization came to us through the agency of foreign missions. So, if only in gratitude for what we have received, let us carry the same forces and effects of foreign missions to lands and peoples where now they are not known ; and let us feel that it is a debt which we owe to the past, and to the present, and to the future, to make this kingdom of Christ, which is so beautiful to us and so inspir- ing and glorious, at home in all the world. But then, men are apt to say, if they are of a practical turn of mind, " Yes, all right ; that is true : but you can't do anything effective in this direction. You might as well undertake to roof the earth with agate and opal, as to make this kingdom of Christ of which you speak universal." Well, let us clearly observe some things about this. We have the same gospel which has been the instrument in this mighty work from the beginning until now, with all its stupendous truths, its transcendent facts, its glorious discoveries of the future, and its sublime opening to us of the way of eternal life. We have it with the Cross, and with the great White Throne. We have it in every element of power that belongs 112 THE APPEAL OF FOREIGN MISSIONS to it or has ever belonged to it, since it was proclaimed by the lips of the Divine Master. And it is the power of God and the wisdom of God unto the salvation of men — this gospel of Christ. It has illustrated its power how many millions of times in the his- tory of the world ! how many hundreds of times within our own observation ! when the harlot has been turned into the sweet, heroic saint ; when the lips that had had oaths upon them, only, have been tuned to the praises of God ; when the rude ruffian of the streets has been turned into the humble, faithful and victori- ous minister of the gospel. It is a power, observe, that never wastes and never breaks — this power of the gospel. You can- not stretch a wire so taut that it will not sag between the poles at the center ; but here is a spring of air, if you choose to call it such, that keeps its elasticity ten years, a thousand years, and has never yielded in the least. It is like a fountain of water which never fails ; it is like the speed of lightning, on which all men can calculate as the same, yesterday, to-day, and forever. This gos- pel of Christ is one of the great unwasting powers in the world ; as fresh and complete in your hand and in mine to-day, as fresh and complete in the hand of any man ministering to any people on the earth, as it was when it conquered Paul, when it lifted Stephen into the rapture of the first martyrdom, when it manifested to John the glory of the Apocalypse. It is the same gospel, — let us never forget that ! And there are better and more effective instruments for declar- ing it in the world than ever there were before. All the progress of modern mechanism has this for its moral meaning. It came, observe, with Christian missions. The telegraph, which enables us to speak around the world ; the telephone, which enables us to talk with distant friends as if face to face ; the mighty steamship, trampling the ocean into a floor, and the railway train rushing over the continent, all came with missions or subsequently to missions, and they have this for their moral significance and pur- pose — to further the kingdom of Christ. They are the whirling wheels under Messiah's throne, as he rides forward to his utter- most perfect supremacy in the world. Our ships took four months in going to India when the first missionaries sailed ; now TO BUSINESS COMMUNITIES. 113 you can speak to Bombay in a day and get an answer. Every- where there is the same progress. The Cunard steamers, I noticed not long ago, which have been running for perhaps a little more than fifty years, if I remember rightly, are said to have al- ready traversed a distance in their successive voyages across the ocean equal to one quarter of the distance of the sun from the earth. That illustrates the way in which the whole earth is now being made a neighborhood. These presses giving the Scriptures in three hundred languages to mankind are as divinely arranged heliographs, flashing the tidings of salvation in Christ and his cross around the world, to every household and to every heart. Such instruments as the world never knew before are in our hand. The child touches the thimble apparent on the surface, which sets in motion vast machineries far away. We have greater instruments for the same gospel, and we have no more obstacles than there were at the beginning. There are always obstacles, growing out of the evil nature of man, his inherited and educated tendencies to selfishness and wrong; but they are no greater now than at the begin- ning. The crafty reasoner is no more subtle and dangerous in India or Japan or China than he was in Rome or Greece; and modern infidelity has to import and transport its argu- ments from those early critics, and those stubborn cavillers against the gospel. Barbarism has no cruelty more savage and relentless than that shown in the early centuries toward the Christians, and shown most fiercely by the most civilized people of those times. The prepossessions of heredity are no greater now than they were. The passions of men are no more domi- nating than they were. The power of governments against the gospel, even in Turkey, is not more strenuous and relentless in its exercise than it was at the outset. Social predisposi- tions against it, and other forces working against it, are no more eager, intense and general, at this hour than they were before. But the gospel has conquered these in the past, and it is per- fectly able, with the grace of God helping, to conquer in the future. Remember, too, that we have now the great secular argu- 114 ^^^ APPEAL OF FOREIGN MISSIONS ment for the gospel, which the world has to see and hear, and which it has been reserved for our time fully to develop. Christen- dom is that great secular argument ; built upon the ruins of the fore- going civilizations ; built out of materials that seemed too mean and vile for any such use, built by the gospel, and now attracting the admiration of the world. In the great Parliament of Religions last summer, many acute and eloquent things were said ; some noble ethical maxims were uttered, perhaps some spiritual truths, by those representing religions outside of Christianity. But in all that Parliament, where men came from India and China, and the isles of the sea, in their superb raiment, with their persuasive and commanding accents, there was no proof of their religion presented like that which every Christian can point to, in his own country and in Christendom at large, which the gospel has shaped — which the gospel under God has created. NOW CHRISTENDOM IS A PROPHETIC FACT. Christendom, when it has been purified and has become cos- mical and ecumenical, is the kingdom of Christ in the world ; and wheresoever any people look to us, or to other Christian nations, for the liberties and the homes which we enjoy, where they see the Christian mother bending with the beauty of love above the cradle, where they see the Christian bridegroom in a holier affection than has been known outside of Christendom clasping his bride, when they see and hear the music and the mystery of the Christian hymn or the Christian poem, and desire the same, — they must take Christianity in order to gain these. It is only mental or moral idiocy that can shut its eyes on this sublime demonstration of the power of the gospel. Then observe that we have had successes such as have not been paralleled in any other century of history. I say this in full view of the fact that the Roman Empire was conquered, nominally at least, by Christianity in three centuries. But re- member that this work of foreign missions began with William Carey, in the circles with which we are connected, just about one TO BUSINESS COMMUNITIES. I15 hundred years ago. Then there was not a Protestant Christian, so far as I know, in any heathen community, who had been reached by the gospel from these States or from England. Now, thou- sands of churches, millions of communicants, hundreds of hos- pitals, and of higher seminaries for instruction, presses putting the Scripture into all written languages, and reducing barbaric tongues to forms of alphabetical language that they may put the Scriptures into them, — all these successes have been achieved within this hundred years. And how many millions, uncounted by us, are rejoicing already in the blessing and the joy of Paradise, because this work of foreign missions has reached them and lifted them into the heavens ! Observe, too, that all this is preliminary. There are always preparatory processes before the climactic conclusion is reached. You see the turbid mixture of the chemist, and there is no crystal apparent there ; but the introduction of another element, not very visible, certainly not great in appearance, turns the mixture into a crystal on the instant. So it is that the Lord comes sud- denly in his temple ; as he did in the conversion of the Roman Empire ; as he did in the great Reformation ; as he did in our great Civil War, wiping out that colossal iniquity which we had looked to see gradually terminated in the course of centu- ries, in the fou,r fierce years of battle and of victory. It is God's method, gradual progression, toward sudden consumma- tion. These are the preliminary successes, and the great success is to come by and by, as I believe to come soon, when a nation shall be born in a day, and when the world, to the utmost reach of its circumference, shall have heard and received the message of salvation. Then remember that we have a power to depend upon which never fails, even the power of the Holy Spirit of God given to us, given to our missionaries ; the same power which spoke in inspiration, and which now interprets the truth, thus given, to those who have not heard it; and till the power of gravitation breaks, till the arm of the Almighty gives way, till the will of God is broken, that power will remain in the church, and for the I l6 THE APPEAL OF FOREIGN MISSIONS church, and there is nothing in human resistance which it can- not and shall not overcome. So remember that we have the same gospel, and we have greater instruments, more multiplied and fit ; we have no greater obstacles to encounter ; we have the grand secular argument of Christendom to present ; we have successes realized, unparalleled in history, and we have the power of God to complete them all — in his Spirit. Whatsoever then we despond concerning, let us never despond concerning this work of foreign missions. It is the one work that is sure to succeed. Here is the standard that never goes down in any struggle. Here is the aim to which we may give our utmost enthusiasm, with the absolute assurance of reaching it. We do not know what the government of this coun- try may be, a hundred years from now ; we do not know what the constitution of kingdoms in Europe may be, a hundred years from now ; we cannot prophesy concerning the future in anything else which concerns human progress. But here is one great luminous prophecy given by God himself, who knoweth the end from the beginning, which will never be disappointed, and never will fail of its accomplishment — the prophecy that the kingdoms of the world shall become the kingdoms of God and of his Son. [Applause.] So let us work. The only thing we need is the power of en- thusiasm, intense, inspiring, unwearying, unrelaxing in our own hearts. Then, when we touch the tender and bleeding and kingly hands of our Divine Master, when we stand under the shadow of the cross, when we stand beside the risen Lord breaking the bars of the sepulcher, when we see him ascending in his glory, when we see him on high with saints and angels worshiping before him, this enthusiasm will kindle in us. We shall be pressed in the spirit ; we shall be driven on, as by irresistible energy, to do more and greater things in this sublimest enterprise which the world has seen. And then, oh then, my dearly beloved, when the triumph comes, when the world ransomed by Christ is submissive to him, and when you and I see it from the heights which we are to ascend, through God's grace and in the uplift of his Spirit, what TO BUSINESS COMMUNITIES. \ \ 7 voices of triumph will be on our lips, and what thrills of triumph in our redeemed hearts ! — words of triumph, and thrills of tri- umph, that shall be with us forever, through the glory of the unhorizoned immortality. [Prolonged applause.] VII. Cl^e aim of foreign a^ijgjsionjs* ADDRESS AT THE ANNUAL MEETING AT BROOKLYN, 1895- THE AIM OF FOREIGN MISSIONS. Members of the American Board, Christian Friends, and Friends of Missions : It would be my choice to sit in silence, and listen to the reports which are brought to us from the missionary field by those whom we have sent out and followed with our prayers, and who come back to tell us of what they have done and seen in the Lord's service, — as our brother who has just spoken, who was licensed to preach the gospel in the lecture room of my own church, has come back to tell us of what he and his associates have seen in Jaffna. But the custom of the Board, and a sort of unwritten rule guiding its proceedings, put an almost peremptory obligation on the President to make an address on this occasion, to the great assembly which is wont to be gathered. I speak, therefore, on behalf of the Board, and not because of any personal desire to do so. There are not a great many subjects which, after the continued discussions of eighty-five years, by multitudes of minds, do not become worn and hackneyed, so as to fail to excite interest and stir animated feeling when they are again before us. We know not very much, and care perhaps less, concerning the questions which were agitating the country in the political administrations of Jefferson and Madison, or the financial questions which were then prominent before men's minds, or even the literary questions which then occupied those who were students of literature. And so it is that multitudes of themes pass away from us, as the mists pass away from the mountain summit in the morning light, or as I 2 2 THE AIM OF FOREIGN MISSIONS. we on the railroad trains sweep through villages, and sometimes through cities, and forget even that we have seen them. But the theme of foreign missions is one that has perennial freshness. It is so vital and vast a theme that it never loses its hold on the intelligent mind and the devout and reverent heart ; and it comes to us to-night as fresh as the dayspring, as fresh as the early spring blooms. I always feel this in rising to speak upon foreign missions, and perhaps more than usually I feel it this evening ; for in the eight years during which, by your command, it has been my duty and privilege to preside in the meetings of this Board, we have had many, and sometimes sharp and vehement discus- sions, many divergencies of feeling and conviction ; in regard chiefly, at least, to minor questions — questions of methods of procedure, questions of preference for one candidate or another, or one class of candidates or another, but questions still which have occupied at the time all our minds to a large extent. Now that these have passed away into the distance, the great theme rises again before us in its original beauty, in its commanding dignity — the theme which has been really behind all these dis- cussions from the outset. It is somewhat as after a windy and gusty day, when the storm has been hurtling through the air, and the skies have been obscured, the clouds pass by, and the great all-encircling heavens are over us and around us in their undimmed beauty and majesty. So it is with this theme to-night. I do not suppose we are all agreed now, perhaps, on points of practice ; perhaps not all on questions of biblical interpretation or of theological phi- losophy ; but there are great things connected with this missionary work concerning which we are agreed. They are the great things : and they are the things which ought, in my judgment, to command the very serious attention, if not the immediate assent, of every thoughtful man and woman, of everyone who is philan- thropic in spirit, and Avho desires to make life sweeter and nobler for others. I marvel that men of the world, in whom is the temper of philanthropy, do not see that this is the greatest cause for them to engage in, with thought and heart, and with free generosity. THE AIM OF FOREIGN MISSIONS. I 23 One of these great things is that which was presented to us so clearly, and with such eloquence of utterance, in the sermon preached the other evening — that the manifestation of God in Christ is essential to meet the deepest need of the human soul, to meet the needs of men individually and universally. Some- times we forget this. We feel as if a man, certainly a man of higher powers, a woman of liner tastes and more delicate sensi- bilities, could go through the world without this, and still retain all that is noble and beautiful in spirit. But this manifestation of God in his Son is essential to the highest welfare of every human soul, in Christian lands or in heathen lands. For the illumina- tion of the mind, if for nothing else, concerning the grandest facts of the universe, this is necessary : to show us the being and government of God, with the supreme, loving self-sacrifice which is eternal in his heart ; to open to us the vital and measureless universe with which we are connected by the essential constitution of our being ; to show us the glory of the immortality, manifest in Christ and emphasized by his cross ; to show us man, in his nature and its possibilities, in his character and its perils ; to show us the way and the promise of the forgiveness of sin, giving new exhilaration to the soul, a new sense of freedom, a new and courageous ex- pectation for the great Hereafter ; to work a true regeneration in the temper of the human heart, by the grace of God accompanying that manifestation of himself in his Son, so that the soul shall enter into fellowship with the Divine soul, and the spirit in man be in sympathy with the pure and mighty spheres of spiritual life to which we are organically related. For all this we need, individually, the manifestation of God in his Son. Nature cannot give us these illustrious revelations, and ' these inspiring impulses. Nature, with fruits and flowers and stately mountains, tumbling oceans and shining skies, all the great and lovely phenomena of the creation, has on it no celestial gleam from within the gates of pearl. If, then, it be a great thing to take a human soul and lift it into Divine fellowship and im- mortal felicity, this manifestation of God in Christ becomes sublime, as the instrument by which to do a work so august ; the work which is our work, our missionary work, our work as persons in the social 124 THE AIM OF FOREIGN MISSIONS. circles which we affect, our work as related to this Board in send- ing this revelation of God to those sitting in darkness, whom we have never seen. Nothing can take the place of this heavenly theophany — no ethics, no philosophies, no scientific instruction. Then, certainly, the Golden Rule applies to us. If ye have freely received, freely give ! This revelation is needed by the highest and noblest spirits as well as by the humblest, by those of grandest power as well as by those of lesser capacity. Indeed, if we may make any comparison, they need it most who are of highest power, for the noblest attainment in character, for the largest usefulness in the world. If we therefore have found education, exhilaration, purification of the spirit, a nobler aim in life, a more beautiful and grand affection toward God in his Son, and a more glorious hope of the Hereafter, by the Gospel, — if we do not give these by that instrumentality to those who have them not, we are mean and greedy, dastardly in temper, and God's frown must rest upon us. But then, beyond this, the need of the communities throughout the earth is for the same manifestation of God in his Son. For communities are primarily moral bodies, as being made up of in- dividual moral persons. They are afterward political, or commer- cial, or industrial, or whatever; but primarily they are moral communities, and all their needs are fundamentally moral needs. Only after these come their domestic needs, their social needs, their needs for the effective prosecution of their life-work, their needs for commercial relations with other people. The funda- mental need is the moral need ; and what ministers to that is, therefore, at the basis of all true civilization. Men of the world often fail to recognize this ; but it is as manifest to one s thought, if the thought be clear, as are the stars in the undimmed heaven The moral need is fundamental, and the ministry to that need must be moral also. Here is the basis, as I have said, of all true civilization. Try- ing to build a civilization without this, on the mere selfish instincts of men, is trying to build a house on shifting sands or fragile shale. It is trying to lift a building, like this in which we are gathered, by attaching ropes and pulleys to the roof to hoist it THE AIM OF FOREIGN MISSIONS. I 25 higher, while pushing up the eaves with poles on either side. We must have the moral basis beneath civilization in order that we may accomplish anything for the permanent welfare of man, and for the glory of God in that welfare. Yet other religions have not the power to supply this need. They do not put in operation the instruments and the forces which are requisite to this result, and therefore it is that they fail. In any Parliament of Religions there may be much comparison of opinions and of speculations. He that hath a dream tells his dream, and he that hath, or thinks he hath, a prophecy, gives utterance to his prophecy. But there is no religion save that of the New Testament, save that which gives the manifestation of God in Christ, which can put the moral basis beneath human society and human civilization. It is this need of men, remember, and this immense need of communities and peoples, which made the travail of his soul for Jesus Christ our Master. The voices of the world are on a minor key ; the dominant note in the experience and history of the world is a wail ; and Christ came that he might, by his tidings from above, change that wail into victorious music, to which the race should march to the millennium. His ideal is the consistent majestic ideal of an enlightened, purified, exhilarated race, full of strength because full of moral and spiritual life, through his reve- lation of God and of the Hereafter. Only that ideal interprets the advent, the cross, and the illustrious ascension of Christ ; it inter- prets the gift of the Holy Ghost which follows ; and that is to be your ideal and mine if we would stand near to the heart of the Master. Surely no other conception ever declared to men on earth is so great and so inspiring as that of a purified race through this discovery of God in his Son ! Observe that that Gospel has the power for this which other religions lack. You say, "Why, it seems to me a very small power ; you can carry it in the New Testament ! " Yes ; the elec- tric power is mighty in its final manifestation, but how silently it traverses the wires ! It only breaks into a transient spark here and there, where the wires disconnect ; and yet that is the force which eliminates oceans and binds continents together on the globe. Steam power does not seem to be great as the child watches the 126 THE AIM OF FOREIGN MISSIONS. vapor, lifting the lid of the kettle, escaping and letting the lid drop back. It does not seem great as you watch it ascending from the engine, a mere vapor, shining in the sunlight and melting into the air. But that is the power which draws the trains and drives the steamship over the riotous waters, trampling them into a floor; that is the power which works in all the multitudes of machineries throughout civilized lands ; that is the power before which the mountain shrinks, is ploughed and carved with marvelous tunnels — a tremendous power, though slight in appearance. Every power, remember, is great according to its efficacy, not according to its phenomena. All civilization, if you think of it rightly, depends at last on invisible forces — on the mind in man, which no one ever saw ; on the will, which no man ever grasped with his hand; on the heroic purpose, on the noble character — all of which are invisible. The Gospel of Christ comes in the Hne with these silent and invisible forces, and operates for the magnificent effects of which I have spoken. Men make a most absurd estimate, often, of the value and power, and the essential fruitfulness, of mere physical instruments. I have heard them say, " Send improved agricultural implements to those whom you wish to benefit ; send power-looms, send print- ing presses." Let us not forget that every physical instrument of progress, as we call it, derives its value and its power from the community in which it is set in operation. You send the type- writer to the hut of the Eskimo, and what can he do with it? He cannot eat it, he cannot sleep in it, he cannot use it as a weapon, he cannot dig away the snows with it ; it is perfectly use- less for all his purposes. You' send the telescope into the midst of a kraal of African huts, and of what value is that telescope there? But you give to those Africans or to the Eskimo this power which comes from the manifestation of God in his Son, in his love, in his purposes of grace and of glory, and the typewriter has thereby come to its use, and the telescope is turned to inter- pret the heavens. For wheresoever the discovery of God comes, there comes to the man a new self-respect, a new aspiration after higher things, a new desire for celestial sympathies, a new purpose of usefulness and progress in the world. There comes superiority THE AIM OF FOREIGN MISSIONS. I 2 / to the circumstances of life ; there comes a courage that looks death in the face ; there come social sympathies ; there come the elements and the developments of a new, generous, and beautiful society. There is not a great journal in this city or in New York, in Boston or Chicago, or anywhere else, that does not depend upon the intelligent and responsive community around it, before it, and behind it, for its power. Without such a community, the most eloquent appeals are like an attempt to shout in a vacuum. The Chinese had the movable type long before Europe, and they employed it in multiplying copies of the Nine Classics, their ancient literature, and in stamping tea-chests. You give the same movable type into the hands of a people like our people, trained by the Gospel, and journalism springs up, and all literary effort results, and a generous literature is produced and distributed. You have brought in a new intellectual as well as a new and nobler social life. Science depends upon that. Scientists are sometimes in the way of speaking sneeringly of Christianity, as of something outworn. They regard it very much as Festus did, as a kind of Jewish superstition ; something concerning one Jesus, who was dead, whom his disciples declared to be alive. Ah, but except for the power of that Gospel, through the manifestation of God in his Son to a community, science there would be as unfamiliar as summer-gardens on arctic parallels ! It is this power within, which lifts society toward new aspirations and new attainments, and nothing else will do it. For, with the new spirit stirring, come the new inventions, the new implements, and the new riches. I have wondered often whether Paul did not mean something besides spiritual riches when he said so emphatically : *' As being poor, yet making many rich." Christendom is rich because the Gospel of Christ is in it ; and any society becomes rich, even in material wealth, as the power of that Gospel reveals itself more and more clearly. This is not theoretical ; it is not fanciful. The demonstration of it is built indissolubly into the history of the world. It was this which gave our fathers their power, on the other side of the ocean and on this. The same power works now wherever the Gospel 128 THE AIM OF FOREIGN MISSIONS. goes ; and therefore it is that despotisms hate it and fight it, and, if they could, would bury it in bloody graves. But they cannot. You might as well try to cut the sunshine with a sabre, and leave dissevered fragments of it on the pavement. You might as well have tried in the ancient time to stop the luminous column that marched before Israel, over the rugged wastes, by flinging stones and javelins at it. You might as well now undertake to shatter the auroral banners in the sky by whiffs of grapeshot. No despotism ever can destroy or permanently arrest the Gospel, because it has the light of God upon it, and bears the noblest life of men within it. We are to remember, moreover, for it is one of the great things about which we are all agreed, that the power of God is in a special sense and an extraordinary measure behind this work of proclaiming his Gospel, in which is his own revelation of himself to all mankind. How apt we are to feel that the work is going forward simply by human instrumentality. Yet, if there is any- thing that history shows, it is that there is that silent, transcendent, imperial, imperishable power always working for its advancement. Remember that Christianity came into the world with the in- tensest possible opposition of the human will against it. In the form in which we have it, and in which we delight and continue to extend it in the earth, it tolerates no lust ; it allows no liberty to animal passion ; it consents to no pride on the part of man ; it calls him to humbleness and to holiness, and against that sum- mons the spirit in man impetuously and imperiously revolts. And yet, coming into the world thus, and carried abroad by a few mechanics, it conquered the Roman Empire ! It seemed before- hand as impossible that it should do that as that it should turn the Apennines into a prairie, or scoop up the Mediterranean in a child's cup and pour it beyond the Gates of Hercules into the ocean. But it accomplished that, and the signal of the Cross on the banner of the Empire became the continual witness to it for all time. In the contest of the early middle ages between faith and barbarism, between the faithful disciples and your ancestors and mine, — painted savages, robbers and murderers in the forests, pirates on the seas, — it was this Gospel of Christ which con- THE AIM OF FOREIGN MISSIONS. I 29 quered, and over all savagery and all violence of man erected the Christian commonwealths, the life and the power of which are in all the earth to-day. This supreme energy was in the post- Reformation period as well as in the earlier time, and it is in the world to-day ; so that wherever the messenger of the Gospel goes there is this silent, transcendent, irresistible power of the Most High behind him. Everything has to give way, in the end, to that ; because this is the cause which is dear to the heart of God, and for his glory in the happiness and well-being of mankind. You see it on every side, you see it in the present day just as clearly as ever in the past. Why is it that the nations are now drawing nearer together, over every land, across every waste of ocean, by these amazing modern mechanisms which came into existence with modern missions, and were never dreamed of before the missionary era ? What is it that makes China so near to-day to New York, nearer in time than Ohio was in the day when Marietta was settled? How is it that we come to know more of Africa to-day, an utterly unknown continent thirty years ago, than we of the eastern United States knew of the great states of Washington and Ore- gon when our first heroic missionaries went there, and saved those states for the American Union ? Every power that stands against the Gospel has to go down. I know it seems for a time as if the onset of violent physical force was to be enough to arrest its spread. Men fear that Turkey is to put an end, by its deadly scimitars, to the propagation of the Gospel in that great Empire. The Turkish Empire always seems to me, as I look at it on the map or in its history, like a vast, magnificent Oriental robe, stamped with splendid and stately figures, emblazoned in all its reach with symbols of heroic com- bat, with threads of gold and silver interwoven thickly with the woof. Magnificent it is, in its extent, in the variety of its resources, in the wonderful history which has been wrought upon it. It is a texture of Oriental magnificence, that has been dipped and soaked in blood. But it is to bear, as certainly as God liveth, as certainly as the cross was raised on Calvary, as certainly as the human soul remains sensitive to divine inspiration I30 THE AIM OF FOREIGN MISSIONS. — it is to bear by and by, and not far hence, the monogram of Christ on all its majestic and glittering expanse. Men speak of China, with its immense area, with its multitudi- nous populations, as being impossible to reach, penetrate, and sub- due to Christ. If China resists the Gospel, it is to go to fractured pieces, like a potter's vessel. Pray God it may not, but may accept that which has given power to other nations such as China desires to have for itself ! But this is the law of history ; whatso- ever withstands the manifestation of God in Christ is broken before it. There may be occasional and temporary revulsions of waves here and there ; but the mighty and tremendous tide of an unseen power which nothing withstands, is sweeping forward toward millennium all the time, and everything that resists it has to go down before it. There is only one banner in the world that never fails and is never furled, and that is the banner of the Son of God ! We see this in history, and we see it as well in the modern advance of missions, and of our own Board. Remember that eighty-five years ago, when an honored officer in my church, the grandson of the second President of this Board, who served you this after- noon at the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper, was a boy six years old, — so recently as that, — we had nothing belonging to this Board, in all the world, except nine hundred dollars in the treasury to send out and sustain seven missionaries, with the unfailing and unconquerable faith of those who had given the money. That was all. Nowhere in any heathen land was there the least indication of the beginning of the recent movement. A Christian Church in Turkey was a thing only existing in the dreams of those who believed that Christ was to have that Empire at last, a thing to be realized in the far future. Now we have one hundred and fifty churches there. A Christian printing-press in the Turkish Em- pire seemed as impossible as a flying stone statue in the air ; and now five hundred millions of pages of the Gospel in the Arabic tongue have there been printed and circulated. High schools, com- mon schools, boarding schools, colleges — it could not be conceived that they should ever exist under the dominion of the Sultan, and within the regions where Mohammedanism reigns. Now there THE AIM OF FOREIGN MISSIONS. I 3 I are thirty-two high schools for boys, twenty-two for girls, with twelve hundred and more pupils in them. There are nearly three himdred common schools, with sixteen thousand and more pupils in them. I observe, by the last summary, that our operations abroad give the following statistics : The number of missions is 20; the number of preaching places, 1,461; the average total congregations, 72,000; the number of laborers in the field under this Board alone, 3,679 ; the number of churches, 461 ; the num- ber of church members, 44,413; the donations given by the native converts to Christianity, $109,000; the number of com- mon schools, 1,0 2 5 ; the whole number under education, 53,615. Well, these figures are not immense ; but remember, as I have said, the unrelaxing and world-wide opposition against which this work has had to be carried forward, the humbleness and small- ness of its almost unnoticed beginning, and the briefness of the time through which it has been working, and you see at once what predictions there are, in even its present achievement, of its future progress and its ultimate triumphant success. The astronomer asks you to give him three points in the move- ment of a star, and then he will calculate its orbit. Here is one point : the beginning of this Board eighty-five years ago, in such utter feebleness. Here is another point : tsventy-five years ago, sixty years after, when the great Presbyterian body separated from the Congregationalists in this work, and seemed to split the vital frame in two, carrying their energy with their resources and property to their own Board of Missions, and leaving the old and honored Society weakened by their departure, though attended still by their sympathy, their affection, and their prayers. An income of $460,000 was diminished the next year to $428,000, while there had been at the earlier period a debt of $22,000, which had to continue. This is the second point. Now we come to the third point, whose statistics I have read : where we have received $716,000 within the year, where there have been these splendid pledges on the floor here for the utter and final removal of our debt, which is surely to be accomplished within the six months to come. If you take the first point, and the second, and the third, then you may calculate the magnificent and triumphant 132 THE AIM OF FOREIGN MISSIONS. orbit of this great missionary Board which is in the end to en- lighten and ennoble all the earth. But let us not forget that the power of God is shown just as clearly, and to the devout spirit even more impressively, in the enthusiasm of the missionaries whom we send out. They are moved to go by their love for God in Christ, and by their desire to communicate the blessings of his Gospel to those whom they have never seen. It is a wonder in history ! These missionaries are not all of them the greatest or the saintliest of Christians. Some- times they are, not always. I cannot but think that the fact that they are not always such gives simply a new emphasis to this manifestation of God in their experience, and in the life of their hearts. They go out from pleasant circumstances of life, from homes as delightful to them as yours and mine are to us. They go to confront discomfort, privation, peril, sometimes death — death even by murderous hands — on foreign shores, on the coral reefs, in the Indian jungles, in the Turkish interior, by the riversides of China, in the depths of Africa. They go far from the homes of culture, from all social amenities and courtesies, from the tone of the Sabbath bell, from the graves where their kindred are buried, from the churches to which their hearts cling. They go, and if they return for a brief vacation they face the ocean and the wilderness again, with undiminished readiness. They leave their children on our shores, whom they are not to see again for years, until the child has grown to the fulness of youth, when the mother may, after ten or twelve years, look again upon the little one whom she left, now matured into the beauty and the power of young manhood or womanhood. That is the sorest strain on the missionary heart ; but they meet it, and go again. They labor long with no visible success, or only the smallest. They lay down their lives in the service to which they have given them, cultured men and women dying with only dusky faces tearful over them, and only the accents of a foreign tongue falling on their ears before they hear the acclaiming welcome of the angels in the heavens. Surely the Spirit of God is in all this ! They go, and they are in victorious joy in the midst of privation and service and sacri- THE AIM OF FOREIGN MISSIONS. I 33 fice. Meanwhile Christians tarrying at home, pampered with all Christian luxuries, overfed with all Christian instruction, their hardest trial to sit patiently through a sermon more than thirty minutes long, who want to ride to Heaven on silver-plated bicycles with rubber rims and pneumatic tires, are restless, mal- content, ungrateful for the benefits they receive, and querulous for any discomforts which they suffer. The inspiring note of Victory is put into the Christian life by missionary devotion and missionary service. And even after they are dead, how their work spreads and fructifies, under the shining of God's face, and under the dews of his grace descending on it ! so that the grave of a missionary becomes the centre of a circle of Christian disciples. I have never forgotten the story of that African chief who had heard unmoved the words of the mission- ary, Mr. Adams I think, who had rebelled against all his instruc- tion and exhortation, but who at last saw him die, of a wasting and painful disease ; he watched the serenity of his face, and saw the gladness in his eye, and he was converted by the dying testimony while he had resisted all living words. So it is that the missionary conquers through his death, and after his death, and the great circle of those seeking God widens from his grave. Therefore it is that these missionaries become to us very priests of God ; they are not only instructors, they are mediators under Christ, bring- ing a higher life into our souls. We reverence them, therefore, and account it a blessing to have their presence with us and their benediction upon us. Therefore it is that their very graves become sacred to us. Yonder four hundred acres of Green- wood Cemetery hold to themselves the hearts of millions, whose friends have there been laid down in their last sleep. The national cemeteries of the country hold the heart of the Nation to themselves ; and these graves of missionaries, scattered over the earth, hold the heart of the Church to themselves. Harriet Newell, at Mauritius ; Harriet Winslow, at Ceylon ; Martyn, at Tokat ; Grant, at Mosul ; Perkins and Stoddard, at Oroomiah ; Levi Parsons, uncle of the honored governor of this State of New York, who died at Alexandria — these places are sacred in the thought and to the hearts of Christians, because of those 134 THE AIM OF FOREIGN MISSIONS. missionary graves. The earth was consecrated once for all by the cross of Christ set up upon it, and it is consecrated afresh by every missionary grave. Every land where a missionary father or mother has fallen is sacred unto God. It is the possession for- evermore of the world-girdhng Church of Christ. Now, this is the power of God working in the souls of men, as we have seen that power working in history. There is a Divine energy behind all this work of declaring the manifestation of God in Christ to the nations who sit in darkness. It is unheard ; but the footfalls of Omnipotence are alway silent. It is unseen ; but the forecasts of Omniscience never reveal themselves in fire and thunder. It is behind all this work, the power of God, which orders the seasons in their march, and which swings the suns on the word of His power. It is that power which is for us, and for those who go to testify for us of the Gospel of the grace of God. Then, my friends, here is duty ; here is privilege. You are a confessed disciple of Christ? Here is your work. You are a man or a woman of philanthropic sentiment and impulse ? Here is your work. The marvel is that the treasures of the land are not poured into this magnificent enterprise. The mind of the world was dilated when this continent was discovered ; the mind of Christen- dom is uplifted, expanded, as well as energized, by this history and purpose of modern missions. We draw nearer the heart of Christ in this work ; he is exalted before us as our King, as well as our teacher and our friend. The privilege of life is to follow in the steps of the Most High, and the one question which comes to us is this : In this prophetic age, in this divinest work, are you who claim to love the Lord willing to keep step with God ? If you are, then your faith shall be renewed ; then the spirit of Christian heroism in yourselves shall be quickened and exalted ; then you shall have a joy like that of the missionary, in your own heart ; then you shall see the future with illumined eyes, and wait the great immortality with exulting spirit ; for then God shall be in you as well as in history, as well as in the missionary, as well as in all his operations on the earth. Children are to be trained for this ; women are to give to it, as they do, nobly, generously, mag- nificently already, more nobly still, more generously and more THE AIM OF FOREIGN MISSIONS. 135 magnificently in time to come. We are to be consecrated to this sublimest service, as God's Spirit touches our hearts, and his prov- idence puts into our hands the means for performing it. Here is duty ; here is privilege ; the privilege of working in the sublimest enterprise of the earth, for which multitudes have died, for which the Son of God gave Himself. Men of the world say, " Oh, yes, but you are all visionaries ; you have an idea of something that can never be realized, and it is idle to call upon us to take part in an enterprise which is so essentially chimerical as is this." Visionaries? They were called visionaries who, in the gloom of the catacombs, foresaw the downfall of the Roman Empire ; but the crash came, and struck the fastening fetters from hands and limbs. They were called visionaries who at the beginning said that the movable type would batter down fortresses, and outlive superb rock-built cathedrals ; but it has come to pass. They were called visionaries who at first uttered the duty and declared the privilege of nations to settle disputes among themselves by arbitration. "A dream of the pious " — that was the word applied to their scheme — "a reverie of the devout," at which practical statesmen and soldiers could only laugh ; but arbitration between nations is now, and is to be more and more, the established magisterial way of concluding great disputes. They were called visionaries even, and only lately, in your cities and in ours, who saw the sterile and rocky wastes outside the town limits, and believed that they could be transformed into the beautiful pleasure-grounds of ever-advancing and majestical cities. They were called visionaries who foresaw the emancipation of a race on our shores, and who wrought for it and fought for it, imtil it had become the sublimest fact in the modem secular history. Christ, remember, was the supreme Visionary of the world, when he said, as the Greeks came to him, saying, " We would see Jesus," " And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me ! " The disciples thought that he meant lifted up on the throne of his glory, but afterward they had to write, " This spake he, signifying by what death he should die." If there was ever an apparent absurdity uttered in human speech, it was this word of the Master : 136 THE AIM OF FOREIGN MISSIONS. " If I be lifted up on the Roman cross, for the scoffing of the Jews, for the contempt of the Romans, I by that cross will win and conquer the World," But he is doing it. Let us be " vision- aries," hke the disciples in the catacombs ; like the prophets of old, who foresaw the coming and the glory of the Lord ; like the Master himself ; until we rise, with all his redeemed and triumph- ing children, to see his face in his glory, with a star for every scar on that majestic and immortal brow, with the crown of thorns replaced by the crown of a celestial eternal majesty I VIII. fncenttoejs to jHij^jsionarr 2Uop6* ADDRESS AT THE ANNUAL MEETING AT TOLEDO, 1896. INCENTIVES TO MISSIONARY WORK. Mr. President, Brethren of the American Board, Brethren the Honored Missionaries of the Board who are present, Christian Friends, and Friends of Missions, — We are gathered in this beauti- ful and prosperous city of Toledo, with which I am sure that many of us had not been previously familiar, under circumstances some- what exceptional. We are gathered here for missionary consulta- tion, deliberation, action, while the United States are being moved to profound depths by a great and urgent political campaign, the discussion of which extends over all the land, reaches into every home and every shop, and is heard continually repeated on the streets. Processions are marching, and meetings vaster than this are assembled, while the columns of newspapers are filled with paragraphs which strike on the ear like volleys of musketry. It is right and reasonable that this should be ; for the issues at stake are important and far-reaching, and it is the right, the privilege and the duty, of every citizen to express his convictions on the questions which are before the nation, in words, and, when the opportunity comes, in the ballot, — the ballot of which it was said, you know, that, — " It falls as silent and as still as snowflakes fall upon the sod, But executes the freeman's will as lightning does the will of God." It is the duty, I say, as well as the privilege, of every citizen to express his conviction by the ballot ; and it is well that he consider largely beforehand the questions involved, and that he be moved to intense conviction by the action of his own mind and by the 140 INCENTIVES TO MISSIONARY WORK. communicated conviction of others. It is for his education, as well as for his direct immediate action upon the course of the nation, that he is to do this. This has been said to be " a cam- paign of education." Every political campaign is a campaign of education ; and the possession of the ballot, with the sense of obligation for the use of the ballot, is one of the most important means of instruction to the American people. This is right, therefore, and reasonable ; and we all sympathize with the profound and impassioned feehng which is behind this wide movement. We may sympathize with one party or another party, but with the general movement of the public mind to the consideration of these questions, and to the appropriate action following, we are all committed in our inmost spirit. We are all profoundly persuaded of the value and the propriety of the movement. We are met at a time, too, when the nations of the earth are largely in a condition of change and turmoil. Not merely in Cuba, where the insurrectionary movement seems cresting toward an ultimate triumph over the Spanish government — whether to realize it in one year, or five years, or twenty years, we cannot tell, — but plainly working toward that result, steadily, energetically, with unlimited sacrifice, apparently, of property and of life ; not merely in Turkey, where outrages have been committed upon our American citizens there resident, native or naturalized, by the story of which our hearts have been thrilled, and our blood has been almost stayed in our veins ; not merely in Russia, which is reaching out for a port far south of Vladivostock, and for dominance in, or the possession of, Korea, — not merely in these countries are these changes going forward ; but in England and in France, in Italy and in Spain, in Germany and in Austria, there is discussion, constant and energetic, of the new questions which are coming up, — questions of finance and commerce, questions of religion, and of the new education. The present century has been a century of vast upheaval, and it is full of the prophecies of changes to come. The strong man of the civilized world is rousing from slumber, and convulsively stretching his limbs ; and there is no social or political forecast that can deter- INCENTIVES TO MISSIONARY WORK. 141 mine for us the issues of the movements which are thus going on, which arouse our attention, and with which we have concern, not so much directly as indirectly, through the effects that are sure to come. We are met, then, in this time of critical interest in our own country and among the nations of the earth ; and it is a perfectly fair question which men of the world sometimes put to us, — which a man put to me not long since : " What in the world are you going to Toledo for, to meet with others to consider the interests of Foreign Missions? Why don't you give strength and time to the work at home, to the political questions which are so imminent and important ? If you cannot affect — as you cannot — foreign politics directly, in the civilized world, why do you go to a comparatively distant point from your home in order to talk with others in regard to this work of preaching the Gospel in the world?" It is a fair question ; and a question to which a reason- able and, as I think, a satisfactory answer can be given, as it ought to be given. It is enough to say, really, if any one thinks of it seriously, that we come hither that we may consult together for the elevation and purification of personal souls in men and women, scattered among the different and distant unevangelized peoples of the earth. For every man who has a soul within him, and is conscious of possessing it, knows in the inmost depths of his consciousness that that is the thing which makes him a man ; that is the thing which transcends in importance everything else that he ever pos- sesses or can possess on the earth, without which the person him- self would disappear in the nothingness of annihilation. Every man knows that ; and he knows therefore that when this soul has been made in the image of God, has been made to share the im- mortality of God, and has the eternal ages open before it, there is no work on the earth so great, so glorious, so supreme in essential importance, as that of reaching this soul, personal and allied in nature with God, and lifting it through God's grace into fellowship with himself, so that it shall be ready for the ages which are to open before it, so that it shall stand undimmed in beauty amid the throng of the celestial intelligences, and before the 142 INCENTIVES TO MISSIONARY WORK. glory of the throne of God. To have done anything for that effect will be to us a joy forever. To have that in view gives con- secration to every meeting assembled to consult with regard to it. And we are right in turning from every political and every secular interest, and coming together to consider the more effective way, the more immediate means, for the accomplishment of this end, in which God himself is interested, for which his Son gave his life upon the cross, in which spirits of light have the intensest concern ; for the accomplishment of an effect that is to last while the uni- verse lasts, and while God exists ! Surely no intelligent man, admitting that there is such a thing as a personal soul, admitting that there is such a thing as reaching that soul by heavenly means to lift it into heavenly expectation, and at last to the realization of the heavenly promise, can deny that we have legitimately come together. But then, we have other aims than this. They are all subsidiary to this and subordinate, but they are connected with it ; and they are important ends, each in itself and all in their combination. We come together here, not that we may act upon the immediate political struggle going on in the country, not that we may advance the interests of either candidate or of either party, but that we may make the politics of this country better and nobler in all the coming time [applause], and that we may do that by exalting the Gospel to its proper supremacy in those poUtics. We come together in order that we may bring the supreme interest of our people, or of any people, clearly before the minds of the communi- ties with which we are associated. The supreme interest of politics in a republican government is never connected with the question of currency, whether it shall be more or less, or of what sort it shall be, so long as it is honest money, accredited at its face-value in the markets of the world. [Loud applause.] The supreme interest is not that of the ques- tion of free trade or protection. Some of us may think protection the better doctrine — protection, not of manufacturers for the increase of their wealth, but protection of laborers, for the sustain- ing of their wages above the level of the pauper wages paid in other countries. [Applause.] Some, on the other hand, may INCENTIVES TO MISSIONARY WORK. 1 43 think free trade a kind of secular gospel for the world, and that commerce should go as freely and universally, in the exchange of articles of manufacture or production, as Christianity itself goes ; that the American workman can challenge competition with the workman of foreign lands without any special protection around him. Wendell Phillips used to say, you remember, that the Ameri- can baby, when he was three months old, lifted himself, looked over the side of his cradle to examine its structure, and then went on to invent an improvement. [Laughter.] The fingers of Ameri- can workmen have often, no doubt, more brains in them than the heads of foreign workmen. But that is not the question, which- ever way you may decide it, that is of supreme interest, although it has its interest, and that interest is a great one. The supreme question is not as to the poHcy of the government in one direc- tion or another, provided the government itself is maintained, to preserve public order, to suppress riot and insurrection [ap- plause], to enable the people to live in peaceable habitations, and to make its power felt in foreign lands for the protection of American citizens. [Loud applause.] But the supreme interest of politics in a country like this is concentered on the question how far the Decalogue is recognized in the land, not as a legendary tradition of ethics, not as a code imposed upon an ancient people by arbitrary authority, but as the rock-basis of civilization, and of all true, high, moral and social development and culture in all the world. The question is whether its Commandments are binding upon us ; and whether the Beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount, with the solemn and majestic admonitions which are connected with them, are recog- nized, not as the " iridescent dream " of a young Galilean me- chanic, but as the fountain Hght of all our seeing, the master light of all our day, in politics and in society. [Applause.] Where these are recognized, there the country is always safe. [Ap- plause.] In other lands, with peoples differently organized, aris- tocratic, dynastic, mihtary influences may come in to detenuine the course of politics ; but in a country like ours, with an in- structed and free people, the moral governs, in the long run. And where the moral sentiment and conviction of a nation take 144 INCENTIVES TO MISSIONARY WORK. the divine ethics as the rule of life, the rule for the government as well as the rule for the citizen, there government is secure, there prosperity is continuous, there progress is certain. Now we wish to make these Divine ethics more and more pre- dominant and governing in this country ; and to do it, largely, by the influence of this enterprise for Foreign Missions. We are not a Home Missionary Society, but through this world-embracing work of Foreign Missions we elevate the Gospel and the Law to their proper majesty before the minds of men. We signalize them, by our devotion to them, by our willingness to serve and sacrifice on their behalf; and we send an impulse into every church however small, into every congregation however remote, for the furtherance of the Gospel, from the estimate which we manifestly and organically place upon it by sending it into all the earth. So it is that every church not coming into this work of Foreign Missions becomes sluggish, inert, effete. We know beforehand that it will; and we know that every church which enters into this work, and glorifies the Gospel by this effort to send it to other peoples of the earth becomes strong, — strong in faith, strong in purpose, mighty in the influence that radiates from it throughout the communities which it affects. And there- fore we are here for Foreign Missions, in order that we may make the ethics of the Gospel, and the Law of God, the founda- tion of political security and political progress in this our beloved land. ' [Loud applause.] Of course the scheming and the corrupt politicians, — of whom there are some, — to whom politics is merely a game like euchre or poker (I believe those are the names), hate the Gospel, hate this movement, hate every influence that makes the churches stronger ; but we are heart and soul in it and for it, and we desire, when we send to China or to Africa, to make the churches in all our own land — in the eastern and western and the central por- tions of the land — more energetic, more enthusiastic, more con- scious of their sublime relations to God and his truth, and of their sublime office in the world. And so we lift politics, if our aim succeeds. That is our endeavor, and by the aid of God's grace and providence we will succeed. INCENTIVES TO MISSIONARY WORK. 1 45 But then, beyond that, we want to lift the politics of the world. As I have said, the world is in a condition of change and up- heaval, but for that very reason the opportunity is before us to build Human Society on the earth to a higher and nobler stature, to mould it into finer lines of beauty, and to clothe it with a grander power than otherwise it could possess. What a wonder- ful thing it is that Christ our Master is the lifter up of peoples, as he was the lifter up of the paralytic and the blind when he was here upon the earth ! He does it by the power of the Gospel. Well, men say, that is a very impalpable power. Yes, it is ! Do you know any of the greatest forces in nature that are not impalpable ? Light is impalpable. You see its effect, in the spring green and in the autumn splendor, in all the beauty of the sunset, and in all the luminous majesty of the night ; but you never saw the elemental essential force itself. Scientists dispute to this day, after all their analysis and all their speculation, as to what it is. Electricity is impalpable. You see it pulling the cars along your streets ; you see it pushing the drills into the mountain tunnel ; you see it behind the multitudes of machineries ; you use it, perhaps, to send your thought and message under the sea to other lands, talking with Constantinople and Calcutta, with Bombay and Hong Kong, almost without interval of time. But you never saw the force itself. No man has grasped it. It is imponderable, impalpable. You do not see the force of gravitation — that mighty muscle which holds the universe together, which rounds the dewdrop and sustains the constellations on their steady poise. If any force in the physical universe were to be seen, that would be the one. But no man ever saw it, though he feels its impact upon himself at every moment and in every place. Life is impalpable, for which this great structure of the universe is builded and held together. Life in all its realms and ranges of animate existence, for which the worlds are made, is impalpable. No man ever saw it. Thought is impalpable ; love is impalpable ; the soul is impalpable ; every greatest force is impalpable, as is the mind of God himself from which that force has come. But it is all the more powerful because it is impalpable. And so with the Gospel of Christ. Men say sometimes, with 146 INCENTIVES TO MISSIONARY WORK. Pilate of old, " What is truth ! " It was not a serious question, of course ; it was the sarcasm of proconsular arrogance. Truth, — it is a dream of the mind, he implies ; it is a breath in the air ; truth has no power ; one rush of the Roman legionaries and it vanishes forever. Ah, but that truth at which Pilate sneered took the mighty empire of which he was a subordinate ofificer and crushed it at last, as the mailed hand of the giant might crush an eggshell. Pilate was mistaken. Men of the world are mistaken, now, when they say that the Gospel is an ineffective force, some- thing for women and children, something for sick people, some- thing for the depressed perhaps, but which for the prosperous and powerful is nothing but breath. The Gospel of Christ is in- visible, it is impalpable ; but see how it operates, not on individ- uals only, but on communities, wherever it goes. It honors womanhood, and makes woman, the former slave of man, the modern priestess of the household. It honors and blesses child- hood ; and that promise at any rate is fulfilled, even in our time, that " a little child shall lead them," — the little child concerning whose death Cicero, that humane and eloquent Roman, said that it was really of no consequence, and not to be thought of after- ward. Now the little child leads the household, leads legislation, controls senates, and constrains them to legislate for its interest and welfare. It is leading famihes, churches, the race itself, for- ward, to nobler and holier thoughts of the future. It is the Gospel of Christ which is doing this. It checks cruelties, it miti- gates the horrors of war by sending the Red Cross to the bloody battlefields and the tern navies of China and Japan, by sending the Red Cross now over the devastated hillsides and valleys of Armenia. It will stop war before long. [Applause.] Yes, the courts of arbitration, which were " the dream of the devout," it was said, three or four centuries ago, when Henry the Fourth of France and his great minister advocated the plan, are now the ever-living and widening aspiration of the statesmen of Chris- tendom. This Gospel of Christ touches despotisms, and loosens and disintegrates them ; just as the ice-bank does not require in the springtime to be broken up by drill and dynamite, but melts into drops and ripples into rills before the kiss of sunshine in the INCENTIVES TO MISSIONARY WORK. 1 47 warmer air. That is the wa}^ in which the Gospel moves to its sublime effects, wheresoever it is established and preached among men. And we want to be in that line of Divine operation. We want to have a part in that great work. The future is coming, moulded by the Gospel and glorified by it, and in that we would have a share. We would elevate the politics of the nation, and the politics of the world, by this invisible, impalpable power. We would have part in the ever-advancing plan of God in the world. There is a plan of God concerning Human Society, as evident as the stars in the unclouded sky, and moving forward steadily to its consummation. This plan of God alone explains the earlier theocracy, and the continued existence of the special Jewish people, amid all the lightnings and avalanches which fell upon them from outside nations in incessant assault. It is this plan of God which explains the coming of the Master, in his earthly infancy, in his heavenly spirit and power, in the fullness of time ; which explains the subsequent progress of history, the breaking in pieces of the Roman empire, the conversion of the savage ferocity of the tribes in central Europe into the spirit of the Christian commonwealths which have taken their place. It is this plan of God which contemplated this country ; which plucked back the knowledge of this continent from the mind of Europe, and kept it reserved for five hundred years after the Northmen had landed here, had lived here, and had described the land. It is this plan of God which contemplated the coloni- zation of this country by the peculiar people who came to possess it j a plan of God manifest in all our subsequent history, mani- fest in the reservation of this great northwestern territory from the sin and shame and burden of Slavery, at a time when only the providence of God could have brought that to pass, through the ministry largely of a New England pastor ; a plan of God which carried the empire out to the Pacific, when the time for tliat had come, and then knit and united the two vast hemispheres of this northern continent together, for all time in the future; a plan of God which is marching on now, even more evidently than ever before, as steamships come, and the telegraph, and 148 INCENTIVES TO MISSIONARY WORK. printing presses, and the closer alliances of Christian nations, and the increasing decadence of foreign powers hostile to the Gospel ; which is bringing in freer governments, with the open Bible trans- lated into three hundred and fifty languages of the earth. Even as the converging regiments and brigades of the army portend the final struggle and prepare for the victorious onset, God is bringing in these forces from afar and combining them for the victory, which is not far off. [Applause.] Now in this work we would have a part. Ah, but somebody says, " But the Turkish outrages do not look as if God's plan was universally or supremely effective. You read, and you tell, of men and women murdered for their faith. Is that part of the plan of God? You tell of the difficulties and dangers which surround those who are still on those fields of struggle and sacri- fice. Does that look like the plan of God?" My friends, as I heard to-day and yesterday those terrific and true statements of what has been endured, and what may be still anticipated, perhaps, in those lands, that great word of Paul came to my thought, a short word, but a great one : " The God of patience." A remarkable word to come from that energetic, indomitable, impassioned apostle ! We think of God as a God of infinite power ; and so he is, swinging the worlds on the word of his power. We think of him as a God of immaculate holiness ; and so he is — blessed be his Name ! as of an infinite authority, and as having the eternal years. We do not always think of him as a God of patience. Patience we attribute to those who are im- perfect in vigor ; who are unfortunate in circumstances ; who are manacled by disease ; fettered behind prison bars ; unable to work their own way and will without aid from others, and only amid constant discouragements. To hear that God is " a God of patience " sounds to us, possibly, like something derogatory to his glory. Nay, verily ; but because he is a God of power, he is a God of patience ; because he has eternal wisdom, and the eternal years, he can afford to let things go for a time unchecked, which are to come in the end to a more disastrous overthrow. Nature herself testifies to that patience of God. The interval between the sowing of the seed and the gathering of the harvest, between INCENTIVES TO MISSIONARY WORK. 1 49 the tiny shoot and the majestic stalk swaying in the air with its fragrant bloom, between the time of the beginning of the slow- growing aloe and its wonderful consummation twenty or thirty or fifty, or even a hundred years afterwards, — this testifies to his patience. His patience is shown in his tolerance of evil forces. Men say, " Sweep them out, shut them up, destroy them ! " God waits, and the evil force comes at last to its end under his patience. He was patient when Nero burned the Roman Chris- tians. He was patient when Diocletian and Galerius burned them by the churchful at a time. Yes, he is a God of patience ; but in the end there came that overthrow of the empire, which, as one of the ancient fathers said, was Hke the crash of a falling world. He was patient when the kings of France, the Grand Monarque and those who followed him, were revelling in the luxurious licentiousness of the superb palace, and in the terrible splendor of the battlefield, while the people whom they had been set to govern were eating grass, and eating earth, and gnawing the bones with decayed flesh on them of animals that had been slaughtered or had died. But there came a time when the God of patience, having endured these things while his purpose con- tinued, let loose the forces which destroyed that monarchy; destroyed it, however, only to convert the nation iato the noble, beautiful, chivalrous, and prophesying republic of the present time. [Applause.] And so he has been patient, not blazing forth in bursts of lightning, not uttering his voice in thunder tones, while these outrages have been going on in Armenia. But, with all his patience, you watch the decadence of the Turkish empire from the day of Nikopolis and of Bajazet to this hour. Watch it from the time of the beleaguered Vienna to our day. See its decadence in our own time ; and you may know that if such outrages continue and are multipUed, the empire shall go down beneath the wheels of that chariot of the Messiah which never goes backward, but always forward, to the destruction of evil and the glory of God on earth. [Applause.] Yes, it is the plan of God in history which we are trying in our feeble way, as he permits and honors us by permitting us, to aid in its mighty march toward the full consummation. That con- 150 INCENTIVES TO MISSIONARY WORK. summation is coming which the prophets saw, and for which Christ died ; that consummation for which so many heroic souls have given life itself. There is to be one language on the earth, not Volapiik, but the language of Canaan, with Father, Son, Holy Ghost, Atonement, Regeneration, and the Immortal Heaven included in it. There is to be a Christian socialism in the world — liberty, equality, and fraternity ; not brought about by human artifice or passion, but developed in the onworking of God's grace and providence until the whole earth rejoices in it. We would have part in that great work, and so a part in the final victory ; and we will not be compelled on high, when the shout of triumph rings through Heaven, to say, " I have no part in the paean, for I had no part in the pain ! I have no part in the victory, for I had no part in the struggle." Then we want, as we are gathered here, to stand in spiritual succession with the noblest and most heroic of the world who have gone before us, or who are with us now. The message of Divine grace in the Gospel is not self-diffusive, any more than is the knowledge of science, or of letters, or of any art. It is not blazoned by God on the sky. He sets the cross in the southern heavens, with its lines of splendor, but he writes no illuminating Unas underneath to testify what it means. This Gospel of Christ is not carried forward by proclamation of angels ; it is given to men to distribute on the earth ; to noble men, and noble women, who are willing to give power and life for this Divine mission. It has been so from the beginning, when they went forth preaching the word in the face of saber and flame, of the dungeon and the arena. It was so in the middle ages ; it has been so in every day since. It has been the same spirit, always, of heroic consecration and self-sacrifice, which has given this furtherance to the Gospel, in Felicitas, in Perpetua, in Blandina the slave girl, who, as Renan says, conquered the Roman empire for Christ. It was so in Holland, to which reference was made yesterday, when, as we read on the brilliant pages of Motley, a Protestant congregation, in Brussels (I think),* was seized in part, with some of its officers, and burned alive in the public?' * Breda? See " Dutch Republic," Vol. I, pp. 492-3. INCENTIVES TO MISSIONARY WORK. 151 square, while the pastor and the others who remained met in an upper room overlooking that square and continued their worship, reading the scripture by the light which flamed from their burning brethren at the stake ! That is the temper which nothing ever conquers. That is the temper which God would cherish and nourish in his Church. That is the temper which has been so illustriously displayed in these recent times, in front of Turkish saber and Turkish dungeon, in the midst of massacre, in that glory of martyrdom which has been the same as in the earlier time. [Applause.] We are not called to suffer martyrdom ; but we are called — and we delight to answer the call — to hold up the hands, and to strengthen and stimulate the hearts, of these our brothers and sisters who are in the midst of a peril sometimes the more impressive because unknown in its nature or its extent, and to walk with them through the furnace, and in the valley of the shadow. We go back to the earlier times, and we come on to the middle ages, and think of Boniface and Adalbert, Columba, and Otto of Stettin, and all the others, and we say, each one, " My soul be with the saints ! My soul be with the heroes and the martyrs, who have wrought for God in the victories of faith, through the triumph of perfect confidence in him, and of the perfect ulti- mate success of his cause on the earth." Surely it is not an ignoble impulse that brings us together ! It is a generous and magnificent impulse of the heart to work the work of God on earth, and to join in spirit with these heroic ones who have gone before. We do not care especially for any tactual succession. We do not care to have prelatical hands laid on our heads. It would do no harm, very likely, but we have never been able to find out that it would do any particular good. [Laughter.] We do not care for similarity of rites and ordinances, but we must be in spiritual succession with these men and these women who have suffered and sacrificed, and died victoriously, in the Divine cause on earth. Therefore we come together, and there- fore we are to go hence to spread the contagion of this spiritual impulse and power in all our churches, and wherever we touch the land. Above all, we would be in sympathy with the Lord himself; 152 INCENTIVES TO MISSIONARY WORK. that Divine Person who came into the earth for our salvation, who tarried on it for our salvation, who died on it for our salvation, and who rose ascending and glorified into the heavens ! If he had been merely a pure and lovely man who taught things clearly, lived a modest and holy life, died without moan at the hands of violence, and was finally buried by his friends, there would be no impulse of this sort. If he had been simply a superior person, coming into the world from outside spheres, initiating a cause here, and then leaving it to go on by itself, there would be no such mighty impulse for us. But as we see him in the scripture, and see him in history, and see him in experience, — the Divine King, coming into the earth that he might save his enemies and lift them unto God ; as we see him glorified on high in the splendor of his mediatorial throne, — the impulse to serve him becomes a boundless, supreme passion of the heart. We would give every- thing to him. Sometimes there comes before every Christian disciple, I undoubtingly believe, the vision of that pallid and majestic face, with the sweat drops of Gethsemane on it and the thorn crown of Calvary, but now with a diadem for every thorn-mark on that majestic brow, worshiped of angels, not remembering the earth only, but loving it and lifting it to himself, sending his spirits, it may be, of light and power, sending surely his Spirit of love and grace and regeneration to carry forward his work on earth, and waiting until the work be accomplished, till he shall see of the travail of his soul and shall be satisfied ! And whensoever that vision comes, — it may be in the hour of high meditation, it may be in the hour of noble resolve, it may be in the hour of sorrow which finds no solace but in him, for " the sacrament of the bleeding heart " is often the best preparation for this vision of the Lord, — whensoever it comes, then there is nothing too great to be done, nothing too precious to be given, for him who hath given life itself for us. We measure what he did for us by the shadows over Calvary, and we say, "O Lord, Brothet and Friend, Redeemer and King ! the wise men brought to thee in thy babyhood jewels and spices, frankincense, gold, and myrrh. Show me what I can give, to add luster to thy crown, to rejoice thy heart on high, and everything in me and of mine shall be a joyful INCENTIVES TO MISSIONARY WORK. 1 53 sacrifice to thee." That was the spirit which conquered the ancient savage and haughty empire — that power of love for Christ, which all its enemies could not subdue, any more than lances can pierce and break the sunshine on earth. That has been the power in all missionary development since. That is the power in the missionary work to-day ; the power which upholds and carries forward those who live and labor in distant lands, through all the scenes of peril and of blood. So it is that we have come together. We would lift the politics of our own nation, in the time to come. We would lift the politics of the world, and advance human welfare. We would work the work of God, keeping step with Omnipotence, not fretting or worrying when discouragements come, but believing in God, be- lieving in Christ, and as sure as of our own existence that in the end glory and peace are to be the issues. We would walk in the bright and magnificent succession of those heroic souls who have given luster to history on earth, and who give beauty to the history of heaven itself ; and we would work, most of all, in loyal and consecrated allegiance to Him who gave himself that we might live forevermore ! No matter for the political campaign. No matter for the unrest of the nations. We are here for great purposes, legitimately here, and when we go hence may it be to carry a blessing from this assembly into all our churches, into all our circles, into all our homes, that will be for the Divine glory and for human welfare ! And let us not forget that life is brief ; that time hurries ; that the hour is critical ; and that what we do to make our memories of the earth beautiful in heaven, and heaven itself more populous forever, must be done with noble service, with generosity, with sacrifice, with love and with prayer, and done at once J [Loud and continued applause.] IX. founDation Crutl^jJ of ametican ADDRESS AT THE ANNUAL MEETING AT NEW HAVEN, 1897. FOUNDATION TRUTHS OF AMERICAN MISSIONS. Mr. President, Mr. Vice-President, Members of the Board, Christian Friends : — My heart was very full when I stood, ten years ago this evening, at this same hour, on the platform of the American Board at its meeting in Springfield, and said that I would take into careful and prayerful consideration the action of the Board in electing me to be its President, in spite of my reluctance and against my protest. My heart is very full to-night, as I stand at the end of these years, and look into the faces of the members of the Board and of this great congregation. Breth- ren and friends, you have done me honor overmuch ! I have tried to be faithful and patient, kind in feeling and fair in action toward every member of the Board, and I have tried to do faith- fully, day by day, what it came to me to do, on behalf of its interests ; and that is all that I can claim. Whatever of success has attended the counsels and the work of the Board while I have held the office of President is due to the Divine Master, and not to me ; to the Divine Spirit, and not to any counsel or judgment of my own. But as I look back upon these years, which in some respects have certainly been eventful years, it is with profound gratitude to God, and with profound gratitude to you. I rejoice to remember that my relations in all this time with all the officers of the Board, and with its committees, have been most affection- ate and confidential; that we have considered the matters pre- sented to us in a temper of perfect impartiality, though with the 158 FOUNDATION TRUTHS OF AMERICAN MISSIONS. most earnest desire to find and to do the best thing. I rejoice to remember that my relations with my dear friend and brother, the Vice-President, have become only closer and more intimate as the years have gone on ; that our minds have been in perfect accord on all principal questions which have arisen, that our hearts have beat in perfect sympathy in all the action which we have been called to take, and that they have only come closer and closer together as we have conferred and acted with each other. I rejoice to look back upon these years of uninterrupted harmony and fellowship, and I pray that in the world to come his mansion and mine may not be far apart ! It is a great relief to me to stand before you to-night without the responsibilities of the presidency upon me, without the solic- itudes and the forthcoming duties which I have hitherto had to face when, during these last ten years, I have stood face to face with an assembly like this, on such an occasion. I should have been most heartily glad to reassume these duties and these solic- itudes, if such had been your wish, if I felt that I had strength and vigor for the work, strength and vigor equal to those which I had five or eight years ago ; but it is a joy to me that you have found another, my dear and honored friend and brother for many years, who will take up this work and carry it forward, in the spirit, as he has suggested, of loyalty to the traditions of this American Board and with an earnestness and a strength which I now certainly could not give to the same work. So I rejoice to be here this evening, and to say what I have to say. More than fifty years ago, when I was a young pastor in Brooklyn, I was invited to join and did join a comparatively small society of fifteen or twenty clergymen, associated in that city under the name, if I remember aright, of the Clerical Union. It was a very pleasant society. I enjoyed the meetings very much, though there were not more than eight or ten usually present at them. The president for the first year of my membership was my honored friend, Dr. Maurice W. Dwight, a relative of the distin- guished President of Yale University, who was then pastor of the First Dutch Church in Brooklyn, and who had been kind enough FOUNDATION TRUTHS OF AMERICAN MISSIONS. I 59 to take part in the services of my installation. At the end of the year he retired, according to the rule, and Dr. Cox was elected in his place. I do not think there were more than seven or eight of the members present when Dr. Cox arose — I can almost see him now in his stately dignity, in his splendid aspect, with the nimbus of white hair around his head — and said, Ufting himself, according to his custom, as he said it, " I wish, before pronounc- ing my inaugural address, to listen to the exaugural discourse of Dr. Dwight." [Laughter.] The word was a new one to me at that time. Perhaps it seemed larger and more resonant than it would have done if there had been a hundred people there ; but for eight or ten persons it seemed rather a waste of articulation. [Laughter.] However, I have always remembered it ; and what I say this evening is to be regarded as what Dr. Cox would have styled ray " exaugural address." Dear brethren and friends, I have certainly no fresh and large philosophy of missions to present. I have simply certain car- dinal convictions, which were in my mind when I stood on the platform at Springfield, and when afterward I accepted the office to which your kind confidence had called me, which have been more and more vitally imbedded in my mind from that hour to this, and by which all my thought and action concerning foreign missions have been moulded and sustained ; and these I shall be glad to recall to you, in a few rapid words, not as anything new or anything startling, but as giving incentive, I think, and motive and the law of action, to those in this country who are interested in foreign missions. The first of them is that simple yet ever stupendous conviction that God has a plan in the history of the world, has a purpose for mankind ; the purpose to bring mankind into subjection, in all its parts, in all its reach, to the Divine law of righteousness and truth, to endow mankind with the treasures of Divine wisdom and grace. It seems to me impossible for any intelligent and reverent thinker to doubt concerning this. Of course the Bible is full of it from end to end. It speaks in every song and every story. It interprets narrative and history. It gives the criterion l60 FOUNDATION TRUTHS OF AMERICAN MISSIONS. of judgment for the character and the career of the men whom the Bible presents. According as they have fallen in with this Divine plan, and have furthered it by their endeavors and by their life, they are noble ; according as they have opposed it, or withdrawn from cooperation with it, they are mean and despised. It is in all the ritual, in all the offices of the ancient dispensation. It is in all the prophecies, pointing on continually to the more and more glowing skies from which Christ is to come in the advent, and into which he is afterward to arise, conqueror of death. It is this vital, undecaying idea of the Divine purpose to bring mankind to the knowledge and the holiness of God, which is the vital sub- stance of the Scripture ; which prepares us for the advent and for the miracle, for the Divine instruction and for the Cross itself, and then for the illustrious and triumphant ascension which follows the Cross. It is this which makes Pentecost divinely natural, if we may say so, and prophetic of all that is to come after in the dispensation of the Spirit. It is this which reverber- ates in the great arguments of the Epistles, and which comes out, as in ruby and jasper and amethyst and chrysolite, in the glorious imagery of the Apocalypse. That the armies arrayed in white are to subdue the inveterate and fierce and bloody evils of the world, that is the burden of that closing book. That is the burden really, from first to last, of all the Scripture ; and no man can read that Scripture carefully and thoroughly without having this deeply and permanently impressed upon his mind. What- ever particular criticisms may be made concerning writings or portions of writings in the Scriptures, as to their authority, as to their proper place in the sacred canon, as to the authorship of them, as to the time at which they were written, these criticisms or critical inquiries no more touch this substance of the Scripture than a minute botanical analysis touches the splendor of gardens or the grandeur of forests, or than the deep-sea soundings efface the blue from the surface of the ocean, or stay the swing of its tremendous tides. [Applause.] But even aside from the Scripture it does seem to me impossi- ble for any intelligent reader of the manifold consenting records of FOUNDATION TRUTHS OF AMERICAN MISSIONS. l6l the past to doubt that God has this plan in human history, and is steadily carrying it forward. From the earlier and the later Hebrew annals, from the histories of Assyria and Egypt and Greece and Rome, steadily we trace this plan unfolding ; unfold- ing through the fire and blood of the Middle Ages ; unfolding in the discovery of this continent at a time when, after it had been for hundreds of years plucked back from the knowledge of Europe, it was brought to light, just when the movable type was in the hands of man and the Christian Reformation was drawing near. Of course there have been setbacks, apparently, in this history of the progress of the plan of God concerning mankind, and skeptics make a great deal of those ; but they are only natural. This is a prodigious and unreturning campaign ; it is not a series of skirmishes unrelated to each other, however brilliant or however disastrous ; and the evil which men see is only connected as an occasion with the vaster development of the Kingdom of God in the world. President Eaton, I think it was, the other day spoke of the streets of New York. I don't wonder that he did. [Laughter.] As I rode over them on Tuesday, coming to the train, seeing the streets torn up, the water pipes burst, large areas flooded with the water, and the air filled with the intolerable gases, I thought that any one passing through New York for the first time might naturally feel that the rocky backbone of the city was being pierced and crushed, and the entire city was to sink into the abyss; but it is all for an ampler development, for an ampler equipment, that men may ride, and women, more rapidly and safely over those very streets, and that the future population of the city may have a finer endowment of opportunity and privi- lege than the present has. Men say sometimes that war comes in to interrupt the progress of God's Kingdom. Sometimes it does. A war of revenge is always demoralizing ; a war of ambi- tion is equally so ; a war of self-defense, for the welfare and honor of a country, is not. I see, walking these streets of New Haven, the blood-red crimson on the foliage, as well as the shin- ing gold ; and neither is more indicative of decay than the other, I 62 FOUNDATION TRUTHS OF AMERICAN MISSIONS. while both are simply prophetic of that verdurous spring which is by and by to come, clothing the lawns with beauty and the trees with the wealth of another year's foliage. So war is sometimes the instrument of God for the furtherance of his Kingdom in the world; and we are not to complain, certainly not to hesitate, certainly not to despond, when convulsions appear among the nations which seem strange in connection with this mighty pur- pose of the Most High. He is working on to his result; and whensoever the conviction of that, the vital and energetic appre- hension of that, enters into the mind of the Church, into your minds and mine, then the enthusiasm for missions is rekindled in us, then we feel the magnificence of the privilege of working with God, of keeping step with Omnipotence in the march toward the future ; then the old enthusiasm, from the time of early martyrdoms, from the time of the early missions, will be reenthroned in our hearts, and we shall see and feel the infinite privilege of men, above the privilege of angels, of working on the earth which Christ consecrated with his blood, for the glory of the Kingdom of that same Christ coming in his power. [Applause.] And then the second conviction, radical in my mind for all these years, and now, is that the instrument by which this work is to be accomplished is the old Gospel, the gospel of life and salvation, the gospel of truth and invitation and promise, and of tremendous forewarning. You have seen, perhaps — I am sure many of you have — a very suggestive, striking, profound essay, published not long since in one of the magazines, from the pen of Captain Mahan. I think that is his title — " Captain Mahan." If thought-power and the power of lucid and energetic expres- sion were the criteria of rank in the navy, he would be high Admiral. In this article he speaks of the general outward im- pulse among all the greater nations except our own, shown in their colonizations, shown in their efforts to gain territorial do- minion in other lands ; and he speaks of the coming together of the Orient and the Occident on the basis of common ideas of material advantage, without the sympathy, the corresponding sympathy, in spiritual ideas. And here he finds a danger — a FOUNDATION TRUTHS OF AMERICAN MISSIONS. 1 63 danger menacing our civilization ; for, as he says emphatically, the civilization of modern Europe has grown up under the shadow of the Cross, and everything that is best in it still breathes the spirit of the Crucified ; and there is peril in bringing together the East and the West on the basis of common material advantage, without this correspondence in spiritual ideas. Then he adds, justly and profoundly, that if this correspondence in spiritual ideas is to be attained it must be not by a process of growth, but by a process of conversion. You may remember in one of the letters of Matthew Arnold, written, I think, to Sir Duff Green (I am not sure), he speaks of the fact that the basis of things in Europe generally, and especially in England, has been for ever so long a belief in supernatural Christianity. That belief, he says, is certainly going ; but he has no other basis what- ever to present for the coming civilization. That basis of belief in supernatural Christianity was around him, was beneath him, was in the air he breathed, was in the faces and hearts of the friends he met, when he wrote those words ; and if it be true, as he also said, that the transformation of the individual is the in- dispensable condition of the transformation of the community, of the nation or of the race, then there was no power in the England of that day, as there is none in the England of this day, to take the place of supernatural Christianity in working out that trans- formation. With its stupendous and unparalleled truths, with its transcendent facts, with its invitations and promises that pass beyond the sweep of stars, with its gracious manifestation of God in tenderness as well as might — the tenderness of his welcoming smile, as well as the might of his stupendous miracle — in all this discovery of the world supernatural with which, by the very constitution of our being, we are allied, with the openings of the future, wherein destinies are to differ according to character, Christianity, the supernatural, reaches the individual heart to grasp it and to trans- form it, and reaches through that the circles which are affected by it, that it may transform at last the world. And there is no other power — none known to history, none conceivable by man — 164 FOUNDATION TRUTHS OF AMERICAN MISSIONS. that can take the place of this old Gospel, which the earliest dis- ciples heard, received, and preached, which has been transmitted unto us, which our fathers loved and honored, in which was the impulse to this great missionary organization, and which is in the hands of the missionaries sent out by it to carry to all the dark- ened world. My dear friends, let this conviction root itself deeply in our hearts, as a vital, determinate conviction, which nothing can shake, that the power to transform the world is in the New Testament of our Lord Jesus Christ ! [Applause.] And then the third conviction is this : — that it is given to the English-speaking peoples of the world, and in a certain preemi- nent sense to the American people, to proclaim this gospel of righteousness and love, and of spiritual transformation, to the peoples of the earth. Every time this thought has come before me it has grasped me with a more prodigious power : this nation, the great minister of God for doing this, His transcendent work, in these tremendous times ! It is shown to be so by its very geographical position. Poised on the crest of the globe, with the two great oceans of the world on either hand, with its 13,000 miles of ocean coast- line inviting commerce from abroad, stimulating commerce in its exit ; with its prodigious wealth, so rapidly accumulating from the mine, from the prairie, from the meadow, from the orchard, from the orange grove, from the sugar plantation, from the wheat field, and the cornfield, and the cotton field, from the silver and the gold in the mines, from the great deposits of coal and iron and copper, from the great riches scattered over the surface, where men may scoop up fortunes in a forenoon, this nation, becoming rapidly one of the wealthiest of the world, perhaps the very wealthiest at this hour, is placed here, in this extraordinary geographical position, that it may send out its commerce, as it does, around the earth, searching every land with the enterprises of that commerce, carrying American manu- factures into China and Japan and India and the islands of the sea, all over the earth. Then think of its composite population, allying it with all peoples of the world ! 16,000,000 of immi- grants in seventy years ! Let that idea be fully grasped — each FOUNDATION TRUTHS OF AMERICAN MISSIONS. 165 of these persons and households >¥ith lelations running back to the different and distant lands from which they have come. Think of this nation as recognized in all the earth foremost in demanding and promoting popular liberty and enterprise, in edu- cation, in government and politics, in social life, and in all the departments of enterprise. Think of it as having a past strangely significant behind it, as well as this out-reaching present around it now ! the only principal nation in the world, remember, that was founded as a missionary nation, that has kept the temper of the missionary spirit from the beginning until now. The fathers came to this continent, then a wilderness, as Governor Bradford said, in the great hope, in the intense zeal, by coming here to extend the Kingdom of Christ in these remote ends of the earth ; and you remember the old seal of the Massachusetts colony, with the figure of the Indian blazoned on it, and for the legend over- head, the Macedonian cry, " Come over and help us ! " That was the spirit in which the nation began ; and in the same spirit its development has been carried on ever since, in the foundation of schools and churches, of benevolent institutions of whatever sort. This great university, which gives celebrity to this noble and beautiful city, was founded to teach men to preach the gos- pel, to preach a sound, energetic theology to all who would hear ; and it has been developed, expanded, built up to its present magnificent proportions, with that same idea behind it, and the same idea within it ; as Harvard College was founded in the same temper, as Williams and Amherst and Bowdoin and Dartmouth have been founded for the same purpose, to train men to preach the gospel. That has been the idea of this nation from the outset on ; and it was that conviction in the minds of the Christian people of this country — that the nation was designed of God to do a great work for him in the furtherance of his Kingdom in the earth — which was an immense power in our Civil War, sustaining the spirit of the people in the midst of disaster and defeat, carrying them upward and onward till the final consummating victory was reached. They believed that God meant this nation to abide, to abide in unity, to abide in freedom, that it might carry the gospel 1 66 FOUNDATION TRUTHS OF AMERICAN MISSIONS." of salvation to the ends of the earth ; and thus came unseen bat- talions of mighty power from the distant lands to which our mis- sionaries had gone, and in which our missions had been established, to decide the fate of doubtful battles, to carry to victory the ensigns of the Republic. This is the temper of the nation ; it is the indi- cation within it, far-sighted and prophetic, of the Divine plan and purpose concerning it. And here is to be the glory of this nation. It is not in its history, it is not in its wealth, it is not in its vast commerce ; the glory of this nation of which you and I are part is, and is to be more and more distinctly in all the future, in the work it does in furthering the Gospel of Christ, the Gospel of transformation, until the ends of the earth shall have seen the salvation of our Lord. [Applause.] And then fourthly, my friends, do not let us forget the final and the most important conviction of all, which is one that has been referred to here again and again in the course of these meetings — that the power, after all, by which we are to work in this effort to accomplish, as far as we may, God's purpose in the world, is the power of the Holy Ghost. It is not in the truths, stupendous as they are ; it is not in the facts, transcendent as they are ; it is not in the tender and terrible solemnity and pathos of the Cross of Christ, even ; it is in the power of the Holy Ghost given unto us. For the Church in the world often simply reflects the temper of the world around it. As the waters reflect the blue of the sky above them, or the gold or crimson or black of the clouds, so the Church itself is continually reflecting more or less distinctly the temper of the world around it ; and especially in times like ours, of vast secular ambition and extraordinary secular success. The temper of the Church becomes secularized too. In time of prosperity it is confident and boastful, perhaps, and feels that nothing can arrest it ; in time of trouble, pecuniary or other, it is despondent, and feels that there is no use in further endeavor. Then quarrelsome divisions come in, as they come in the neigh- borhoods of the world, and the life and power of the Church fail because there is not this Divine energy within and beneath. It does seem to me. Brethren of the American Board and Christian FOUNDATION TRUTHS OF AMERICAN MISSIONS. 1 67 Friends, that we fail wholly to apprehend and appreciate the fact that in this tremendous parenthesis in history, between the ascen- sion of the Master into the sky and his coming again in clouds and glory for the judgment of the world, the Divine agent for carrying forward the work of God on earth is the Holy Ghost ; the Holy Ghost entering into the hearts of men ; the Holy Ghost with his omnipotent and unsubduable power, silent and yet mighty. Men of the world are not indisposed to sniff at this, because they do not see the power. Well, we do not see the powers in the natural creation which work the greatest results. We do not see the power which binds the universe together. It is perfectly impalpable, though we are all within its grasp. We do not see the power in the vapor which revolutionizes civilization, tunnels the mountains, tramples the sea into a floor ; we do not see the power in the type which the finger holds, and which dominates cathedrals ; we do not see the power in the little spark which abolishes oceans and knits nations into neighborhood. All are silent unconspicuous powers, as is this power of the Holy Ghost ; but what a power of transformation it is, in individual experience and in the history of communities ! what a power to lift the race nearer the holiness of the throne of the Most High ! It is the power necessary to generate and to maintain missionary enthu- siasm. Missionary enthusiasm is not merely faith, confidence in God, confidence in his word ; missionary enthusiasm is love for mankind, inspired by and touched with a Divine fire ; and where this power of the Spirit of God is, there that missionary enthu- siasm manifests itself in irresistible energy and efficacy. See it in the missionaries of the Middle Ages, to whom Dr. Smith referred yesterday in that remarkable paper, in Anskar and Benedict and all the others. You see it in the missionaries of our own time, and our own Board. I was very much touched the other day with the fact that a missionary woman, wife and mother in South Africa, out of her small savings had sent a gift to the American Board of %y:>o in gratitude for the commissioning of her third child to do missionary service in foreign lands ! [Ap- plause.] I put that to you, reluctant to give money, utterly 1 68 FOUNDATION TRUTHS OF AMERICAN MISSIONS. unwilling to give sons and daughters to this distant and dangerous service and work, and ask if there is not the power from the Spirit of God in that heart which you more vaguely, if at all, feel in yourselves. I remember that passing of the missionaries at Harpoot from a domicile that was already being shattered by shot to another where, for the time at least, they might have more security, men and women going together through the storm of bullets, carrying two who were too aged and infirm to walk them- selves, and not a man nor a woman flinching or screaming as they moved along that path of death ! That 's the power of missionary enthusiasm ; that 's the tranquillity of the temper that is insphered in the heart of God ; and when that power is among the churches, and in our hearts, then treasures are unlocked, then divisions are forbidden or are reconciled, and then is the energy erf the Holy Ghost revealed ; working through our small affairs to accomplish the sublime Divine design. Yes, the power of the Holy Ghost — that is the energy on which we must rely to carry forward this work of God to its triumphant and immortal success. So, ray dear friends and brethren, members of this Board, and Christian people interested in this work of missions, I bring to you these convictions, which, as I said, are not new, which were central in my heart and mind ten years ago when I faced you for the first time on the platform at Springfield, which have been only more and more thoroughly and vitally enthroned in my mind and heart from that day to this. Let us work alojig the lines, and on the levels, of these cardinal and superlative convictions : that God has a plan in history, that we may work with that plan, and be as sure as we are of God's character, as sure as we are of God's be- ing, that ultimate success shall crown it ; and let us work with the Gospel, the Gospel of life and salvation, which he has crowded and rammed with spiritual appeal to every soul of man. Let us work feeling that this is the opportunity of the ages, that this na- tion is the minister of God for the ages to come ; by its position, by its power and resources, by its relation to other peoples, by its past history, it is the servant of God for furthering His divine de- signs on earth ; and let us work always in the inspiration of that FOUNDATION TRUTHS OF AMERICAN MISSIONS. 1 69 Holy Ghost who separated Barnabas and Saul to the work of mis- sions, who separated the medieval missionaries from all the quiet- ness of monasteries and the seclusion and delight of Ubraries, to go out facing death that they might teach men of the Lord. Let us. work under the power of that Spirit which we have seen in our own missionaries, felt in our own hearts — felt more than once, thank God, in these great assemblies ; and let us do promptly what we have to do ! I look back to that evening at Springfield ten years ago, and of the one hundred and sixty-five members of the Board then present and voting, I think a full third have already passed away from life on the earth, among them some of the most eminent and distinguished : two secretaries. Dr. Clark and Dr. Alden ; the honored and beloved treasurer, Mr. Ward ; Ezra Famsworth, at that time and for a long time a chief member of the Pruden- tial Committee ; many of the distinguished members, as I have said, of the Board, among them my own deeply loved and trusted friends, Dr. Dexter, Dr. Quint, Dr. William M.Taylor — whose name, as often as I utter it, brings a fresh throb to my heart. These were the three men who said to me : " You hesitate, you reluctate before this election ; accept it and do your best," which I have tried to do. [Applause.] I remember, also, the others : President Porter, President Seelye, President Chapin, President Andrews, Dr. Eddy, Dr. Magoun, Dr. Patton, Dr. Harding, Dr. Atwood, my college classmate and lifelong friend, Dr. Robbins, my own pupil in the Gospel, Dr. Malcolm Dana — I cannot recall them all, these are examples ; and my dear kinsman according to the flesh, my dear brother in the spirit and the life of the soul, at whose house I tarried then, to whose house the messengers of the Board came to notify me of my election, my dearly honored and beloved and trusted Dr. Eustis, of Springfield. I remember, too, the noble laymen who have been associated in the Board and who were there at that time, who have passed on : Mr. Battell, of this State ; Mr. Monroe, of this State ; Frederick Billings, Horace Fairbanks, Mr. James P. Wallace, of my own church ; Mr. John N. Stickney, Mr. James White, Mr. Charles Theodore Russetl, 170 FOUNDATION TRUTHS OF AMERICAN MISSIONS. Mr. Samuel D. Warren, Mr. Philip Moen — oh, I cannot begin to recite the names ! you remember them. All these have gone on into the life beyond. My dear Friends, let us work ! It has been said to us here, again and again, in the course of this meeting, " Work while the day lasts, for the night cometh when no man can work." I cer- tainly shall not dispute that word from the lips of the Master ; but I will add, with the Apostle, work, and work with all your heart and with all your might, not only because the night cometh, for we are the children of light and the children of the day ; we are not of night nor of darkness ; therefore let us be sober, put- ting on the breastplate of faith and love, and for a helmet the hope of salvation, since the Lord hath not called us to death but to hfe, that we may live together with Him, whether we wake or sleep on the earth. I think of those who have gone on, not as buried in the dust of death, not as sleeping in the darkness and the silence ; I think of them as ascending the starry steeps and stand- ing before God, as hearing the Master's voice of welcome and acclaim, and joining in the worship of angels and of saints, their works following with them -, and I pray God that you and I may be with them, and hear the same voice of welcome, when the shadows flee, and the darkness disperses, and the splendor of Im- mortality breaks upon our vision ! [Applause.] X. Cl^e pttmantnt iWiotite in ^iMomtv movfu ADDRESS AT THE INTERNATIONAL CONGREGATIONAL COUNCIL, BOSTON, 1899. THE PERMANENT MOTIVE IN MISSIONARY WORK. Mr. President, Brothers and Sisters of the Council, Christian Friends: No one, I am sure, can more profoundly regret than I do the removal by death from this scene and this service of our honored and beloved brother, Dr. Lamson, president of our old- est and largest missionary society. His work in the world-wide interest of missions was finished when it seemed to us to have hardly begun. The star went down when it had scarcely crossed the meridian ; and we are left, as so often we have before been left, to bow before an inscrutable wisdom, and to say, " Thy ways, O Lord, are past finding out ; nevertheless, not our will but thine be done." It must strike one with a sense of unnaturalness, that the older tree should stand when the younger and more vigorous has been suddenly broken ; and that I, who have been retired from every occasion of this kind for many months, should be suddenly called upon to take his place for the service which he would far more suitably have performed. But we have to face facts as they meet us in life and adjust ourselves to them, and to do as courageously as we may the duty which seems plainly to fall to us. Standing for the hour in his place, I can only suggest some thoughts, which may or may not be coincident with those which he would have presented if he were here, but which were borne in upon my own mind, constantly, while I occupied the office in which he succeeded me, and to which I am sure he would give his cordial assent. The Permanent Motive in Missionary Work : that was the theme which he had selected, and which we had hoped to hear 174 THE PERMANENT MOTIVE treated by him with his customary and characteristic eloquence, impressing upon us his matured thought, and his earnest and in- spiring feehng on the great subject. It is a catholic and compre- hensive, even a cosmopolitan theme. It does not concern itself simply with the interest of foreign missions, technically so called, although it may be that that interest was prominent before his mind as he chose and announced the theme. But, if you think of it, it concerns not Congregationalists only, but those in every Christian communion who are trying to further the cause and kingdom of our Lord on the earth. It concerns not the mission- ary fields alone, as they are popularly called, in other lands, but every field in which Christian service is sought to be rendered, from the obscurest slum in this town of Boston to the ragged edges of the circumference, the outmost circumference, of the world of mankind. The Permanent Motive in Missionary or Christian Work : that is what we are to look for. We are familiar, of course, with the temporary, local, changing motives to missionary enterprise, which meet us at times, impress us forcibly for the moment, and pass away ; the influence of great and signal occasions, when sympathie are almost tumultuously excited ; the impulse which comes with a sweeping eloquence, which lifts us from the common levels of earth, and bears us as on wings toward issues and actions which we had not anticipated ; perhaps the impulse which comes with personal interest in mis- sionaries whom we have known, or mission fields which we have traversed. Great successes on certain fields move our enthusi- asm ; or tragic and terrible experiences in others, as recently among the Armenians, stir the deep fountains of our feeling. No one of these impulses is to be disregarded. Each one in its place has a power of its own, and all are to be valued and wel- comed for their effect. But what we are to look for is the motive more deep, permanent, governing, which will be beneath and be- hind all these ; as the tide-motive is beneath and behind the ad- vancing and retreating waves which rise and flash, and break upon the beach ; and this will be a motive not simple and single, but no doubt combined of several, distinguishable from each other, as a powerful current is made up of different uniting affluents. IN MISSIONARY WORK. I 75 We must separate them in thought, that we may afterward com- bine them. I think first, then, we shall all recognize this as essential to the missionary motive : a clear and profound recognition of the evil- ness and misery of the actual condition of mankind, certainly as compared with the powers which are instinctive in every human soul. It makes no difference really, or very little, at this point, whether we accept the Scriptural declaration that man has fallen from a higher estate to his present level, or conceive, with some modern theorizers, that man is just now partially emerging from the conditions of his brute-ancestry, stumbling up, through sin and error and manifold tremendous mistakes, toward wisdom and virtue, and the blessedness which they bring. In either case, the present condition of mankind is one of imperfection, weakness, unsatisfied desire, unreaHzed. promise, and manifold peril. It is not the missionary who tells us this, principally or alone. Every observant foreign traveler repeats the same. Every one who has resided abroad, and then has come back to testify with an un- prejudiced mind to that which he has observed, relates the same. The supreme difficulty here is in the want of the recognition of God, and of the great Immortality. It used to be a reproach against Christian scholars, made by skeptics, that they investigated the ethnic religions in the spirit of suspicious hostility, by which their processes were diverted from true lines, by which their conclusions were colored. I am not concerned to argue the case of the Christian scholars of fifty years ago, or more, but I can certainly affirm that the Christian scholars of our own time investigate these religions carefully, patiently, sympathetically, with an eager desire to find everything in them that is of beautiful worth ; and they do find many things of truth and beauty, many things which excite their admiration, as illus- trating the attainment of the higher aspiration of the human mind, reaching after the Unseen if haply it might find it. But they find nowhere the discovery of one personal God, eternal in au- thority, immaculate in character, creating man in his own image, and opening before him the ageless immensities beyond the grave ; and in the absence of such recognition of God, and such recogni- I 76 THE PERMANENT MOTIVE tion of the Immortality, man is left to grope where he cannot fly, to clutch the earth where he misses Heaven. So it is that indus- trially, politically, commercially, socially, intellectually, he is on the lower level, until some exterior power reaches and ennobles him. So it is that crime, such as is unknown in Christian com- munities, is familiar and tolerated in the world. In fact, we need not fix our thought, prominently, on the more devilish crimes which still exist in parts and portions of the earth, — cannibalism, infanticide, human sacrifices, self-torture, the slavery that would destroy body and soul together in its own hell. Commoner vices have told us the story sufificiently, — drunkenness, licentiousness, the gambling passion, the opium habit^ the fierce self-will that rushes to its end, regardless of anything sacred, in order to attain its pleasure. All these we know. How familiar they are to the mind, and in the life, of the world at large ! And there seems no power arising within the circle not reached by Christian influence to relieve the gloom, to elevate those who are oppressed by these sore burdens. There is no power. Property asserts its right to oppress, and to enjoy ; poverty accepts its function, however unwillingly, of suffer- ing in silence ; the degradation of woman strikes a vicious stab at the heart and conscience of immense communities, while the op- pression of childhood blights life at its germ ; and, with the pros- pect of nothing better to come, suicide becomes a common refuge from the unbearable misery. There is nothing overstated in this description of the world at large ; and you know how it is in your city-slums, even in this city of refinement and culture I have no doubt, certainly in the city in which I live ; in the London and Birmingham of the other side, where the little girl twelve years old had never heard the name of Christ, where the boy of about the same age only knew the nature of an oath by having been his lordship's caddy. These are what we are to reach and lift, if we can do it. These are they to whom we are to bring blessings from the Most High. Certainly, every heart in which there is a spark of Christian sympathy must feel the power of this motive, pressing to the utmost and instant exertion of every force to relieve the suffering, to enlighten the darkened, and to lift the oppressed. IN MISSIONARY WORK. I 77 No one need exaggerate, every one should recognize, the weak- ness and wretchedness, the exposure and the peril of human society. When we rQmember that in this universe of ours destiny clings closely to character, has never anything mechanical or arbi- trary about it, but follows the spirit which encounters it, then those tremendous words of our Lord in the twenty-fifth of Matthew have upon them an appalling sharpness and reach, as addressed to great classes and companies of mankind ; and we must recognize it, and hear the solemn bell of the universe ring- ing through his word, and telling us of what is to be looked for in the Hereafter. But then with this recognition of the exposure and peril of human society, of mankind at large, we must associate the recog- nition of the recoverableness to truth, to virtue and God, of per- sons and of peoples who are now involved in these calamities and pains ; to whom, now, unrest and apprehension are as natural as speech or sight ; the recoverableness of men as persons, and of communities as well as persons. Here, of course, we come into direct antagonism with the pes- simist, who says, " It is all nonsense ! you can't possibly do the work ; you can't take these ragged and soiled remnants of human- ity in your city-streets and weave them into purple and golden garments for the Master ; you cannot accomplish the effect which you contemplate, in the cities, in your own land, along the frontier, or in other lands. It is as impossible to make the unchaste pure, to make the mean noble, as it is to make crystal lenses out of mud, or the delicate elastic watch-spring out of the iron slag ! " That is the world's view, a common and a hateful view. Our an- swer to it is that the thing can be done, and has been done, and done in such multitudes of instances that there is no use whatever in arguing against the fact. Christ came from the heavens to the earth on an errand. He knew what was in man ; and he did not come from the celestial seats on an errand seen and known be- forehand to be fruitless and futile. He came because he knew the interior, central, divine element in human nature, to which he could appeal and by which he could lift men toward things tran- scendent. We have seen the examples of success, how many 178 THE PERMANENT MOTIVE times ! hundreds, yea even thousands of times, in our own com- munities, as missionaries have seen them in the lands abroad : where the woman intemperate, in harlotry, in despair, has been lifted to restored womanhood, as the pearl oyster is brought up with its precious contents from the slimy ooze ; where the man whose lips had been charged with foulest blasphemies has become the preacher of the gospel of light and love, of hope and peace, to others, his former comrades ; where the feet that were swift to do evil have become beautiful on the mountains in publishing sal- vation. We have seen these things in individuals and in com- munities ; in the roughest frontier mining-camp, where every door opened on a saloon or a brothel, or a gambling-table, and where, by the power coming from on high, it has been transformed into the peaceful Christian village, with the home, with the school, with the church, with the asylum, with the holy song, where the former customary music had been the crack of revolvers. We have seen the same thing on a larger scale in the coral islands, scenes of savage massacre and of cannibal riot and ferocity, where the church has been planted, and Christian fellowships have been established and maintained. We have seen these things, and why argue against facts ? Arguing against fact, as men ultimately find out, is like trying to stop with articulate breath the march of the stately battleship Olympia, as she sweeps onward to her anchorage. An argument may meet a contrary argument; no argument can overwhelm a fact. And these facts in experience are as sure, as difficult of be- lief perhaps, but as compulsive of belief, as are the scientific demonstrations of the liquid air, of the wireless telegraphy. We do not question the reality of what we see ; and we know that these effects have been produced, on the smaller scale and on the larger. I suppose that every one who has ever stood on the heights above Naples, at the church of San Martino, on the way to -St. Elmo, has noticed, as I remember to have noticed, that all the sounds coming up from that gay, populous, brilliant, fascinat- ing city, as they reached the upper air, met and mingled on the minor key. There were the voices of traffic and the voices of command, the voices of affection and the voices of rebuke, the IN MISSIONARY WORK. I 79 shouts of sailors, and the cries of itinerant venders in the street, with the chatter and the laugh of childhood ; but they all came up into this incessant moan in the air. That is the voice of the World in the upper air, where there are spirits to hear it. That is the cry of the World for help. And here is the answer to that cry : a song of triumph and glorious expectation, taking the place of the moan, in the village, in the city, in the great community ; men and women out of whom multitudes of devils have been cast, as out of him of old, sitting clothed, and in their right minds, at the feet of Jesus. You cannot tell me that it is impossible to produce these effects, for mine own eyes have seen them, mine own hands have touched them. I know their reality, and that every human soul which has not committed the final sin and passed the judgment is recover- able to God, if the right remedy be definitely applied \ and that every people, however weak, however sinful, however wanting in hope and expectation, has within it the possibility, and above it the promise, of the Millennium. God's power is adequate to all that. We want to associate this idea of the recoverableness of persons and of peoples to the highest ideal and to God himself ; we want to combine this with the idea of man's present misery and hopelessness in his condition, to constitute the true and powerful missionary motive ; and then we want to recognize the fact that the Gospel of Christ is the one force which, being used, secures this result in the most unpromising conditions. Here, again, we encounter the opposition of multitudes. How often men have laughed, how loudly they have laughed, at the idea that the story of the crucified Nazarene could inspire a despondent soul to hope, could purify the vicious soul unto virtue, could bring any soul nearer to God ! Perhaps somewhere they are laughing at it now ; possibly even in this city of Boston, the home of culture and refinement, of fine and wide thought — I don't know, I don't live here ; but I know that in the country at large there are always those who are disposed to say, " It is per- fectly puerile to try to reach human sorrow and human sin with the power of the Gospel, lodged in the little book which the child may carry in her hand ! " As if the inconspicuous forces in the l8o THE PERMANENT MOTIVE world's development were not always those deadliest on the one hand, or most benign on the other ; as if wafts of air did not kill multitudes more than all the batteries of artillery ; as if the unseen forces, hardly manifesting themselves at all, were not those which society seizes by which to advance itself most rapidly and grandly — that little spark, vanishing instantaneously, but revealing the unseen force which drives machineries, draws carriages, illuminates cities, and enables you and me to talk as if face to face with friends and correspondents at the distance of a thousand miles ; that fleecy vapor, vanishing silently into the air but representing the gigantic servant of modern civilization, which tunnels mountains, scoops out mines, and links the continents together in iron bands. These unseen powers are the ones that man craves and uses, or that, on the other hand, he dreads and repels ; and the power of the Gos- pel, however men may smile at the idea of that power, has vindi- cated itself too many times to be assailed by argument, certainly too many times to be encountered with ridicule. The Gospel is able to reconstitute society by reconstructing the character of individuals. Through its effect on persons it opens the way for vast national advances. It touches not merely the higher themes, but all the themes that are associated with those, and immediately pertinent to the interest of mankind. It teaches frugality and industry, and honesty, by express command, and by the divine example of Him who brought it to us. It turns men, as has been forcibly said, " out of the trails of blood and plunder into the path of honest toil." It is a gospel for every creature, that is, for every created thing ; and gardens bloom in a lovelier beauty under its influence, and harvest-festivals, of which the country is full to-day. are only its natural and beautiful fruit and trophy. It exalts womanhood ; and by the honor it puts on womanhood, and by the honor it puts on childhood, it inaugurates the new family-life in the world. It honors, as no other religion does or ever did, the essential worth of the immortal spirit in man ; and it forces him, pushes him, crowds him, into thoughtful- ness and educational discipline, since it will not allow him to be manipulated into paradise by any priestly hand, but comes to him in a Book, and sets him to work to investigate its contents, to IN MISSIONARY WORK. l8l inquire concerning it, to look out widely around it, and to inform himself by careful thought of what it is and what it means. There is the basis of colleges and theological seminaries, and I hope there will be no quarrel between them ! There is the basis of all the educational institutions and influences that are worthy in the world. Christianity brings them. It generates by degrees a new social conscience. It unites communities, on which it has operated, in new relationships to each other. International alli- ances become possible, become vital. International law becomes a reality and a power ; beneficence is stimulated, and law becomes ethical. As we have seen recently, in the prodigious excitement of feeling throughout civiHzed countries in consequence of the apparent gross injustice done to a single French officer by a mili- tary court, the time is coming, though it has not yet fully come, when mankind shall be one in spirit, and an "... instinct bear along, Round the earth's electric circle, One swift flash of right or wrong." It is not commerce which does this, it is Christianity. We are witnesses to it. Our ancestors, not many centuries ago, were mere rapacious savages, robbers in the forest, pirates on the sea ; it was Christianity, brought to them, that Hfted them into gladness, serenity, great purpose, great expectation and hope ; and the new civilization in which we rejoice on either side, I will not say of the separating, of the uniting, ocean, was founded on that New Testa- ment, the folios of which, I believe, are still preserved in Corpus Christi College in Cambridge, and in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. Here is the basis of what has been grandest, most illus- trious, and most prophetic, in the recent history of mankind. Give the Gospel freedom and it will everywhere show this power. Among the children and youth to whom it goes, among the mature and the strong, wheresoever it goes, it grapples conscience, it stim- ulates the heart. That one sentence, " The blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth us from all sin," is the profoundest truth, is the most persuasive and commanding appeal, ever addressed by an inspired l82 THE PERMANENT MOTIVE apostle to the children of mankind ; and wherever that is heard, sin is lost in penitence, and hope is lost in triumphant vision, and the glory of the world disappears before the glory immutable of the Son of God ! Then we are to remember, certainly never is this to be forgotten, that the great imperishable motive, surpassing and dominating every other in missionary effort, is adoring love toward Christ, as central in the Scripture, glorified in history. No student of his- tory, no observer of human experience, can fail to see that there is the sovereign passion possible to human nature ; beside which the passion of love for a friend, for a country, for a business, for studies, may be auxiliary, but must be subordinate. There is the passion which has done the grandest things the world has ever known. There is the passion the vision of which interprets to us the strangest, sublimest pages of history. We have all felt it, I am sure, if we are Christian, in our measure, and at times ; at the sacrament, perhaps ; in those sabbaths of the soul of which Cole- ridge speaks, when the mind eddies around instead of flowing onward ; when we have been moved to a great effort for Him whom we love ; most keenly, perhaps, when we have been in keenest sorrow, when the earth was as iron under our feet and the heavens as brass above our head, and we were all alone, yet not alone, for there stood beside us one in the form of the Son of Man, making luminous the dark ! We have felt this love toward Christ ; and when we have felt it we have known that no power could surpass or approach it in the intensity of its moving force, to every enterprise, great, difficult howsoever it might be, by which he would be honored. Love has been the sovereign po^ver in all the church. Judg- ment may be generous ; love is lavish. Judgment may be stead- fast in its conclusions ; love is heroic in its affirmations. It was love that garnished the house, and poured out the spikenard, and spiced the sepulcher. It was love that faced the flame, as in Felicitas and Perpetua, fronting the dungeon and not shrinking, fronting the sword and not blanching. It was love that said, "The nearer the sword, the nearer to God." You cannot con- quer that power, indestructible, full of a divine energy. IN MISSIONARY WORK. 1 83 And with the experience of this comes the vivid vision of the Divine Providence, working for the gospel in human history. How wonderful it is ! Look at the progress of the last ninety years, since missionary work began in this country ! The changes, except as they are matters of public record and of universal personal observation, would be simply unthinkable — the vast new machineries of travel and of commerce ; the incal- culable additions to the wealth of civilized lands ; the ever- increasing prosperity and power of Protestant nations, in which the gospel is honored ; the equally ever-reduced power and lessening fame of nations, ancient and famous, in which the gos- pel is refused free movement with a home among the people ; the continually closer approaches of civilized and Protestant nations to each other, as of Great Britain and this country. Many years ago Lord Brougham said, you remember, " Not an axe falls in the American forest but it sets in motion a shuttle in Manchester." That has been true ever since, and is more true to-day than ever before. Not a mine is opened, not an industry established, not a mechanism invented in the one country, which is not recognized, and the power of which is not felt, in the other ; and more and more their policies are weaving together, not necessarily in form, but in fundamental, underlying sympathy. All these things are going forward with the opening of regions and realms formerly inaccessible to Christianity ; so that now the Christianity which seemed buried in the catacombs, which seemed burned up in the martyr fires, has the freedom of the world, and may everywhere be preached in its purity and its power. Here are the plans of God going forward ; and we ought to feel in ourselves that in every hardest work we do we are only keeping step with the march of Omnipotence. I know that there are many who fear that the prosperity of our times, the love of pleasure, the desire for ease and enjoyment, are to interfere with and stay these plans of the Divine Provi- dence for the furtherance of Christ's church, and of his cause in the world. I do not wonder at the fear, though I do not share it. Unquestionably the secular spirit is more intense and widely distributed at this time than it ever was before ; and the oppor- 184 THE PERMANENT MOTIVE tunities for its gratification, in the acquirement of wealth and in the enjoyment of every luxury, are greater than ever before. Undoubtedly it is true that Sunday observance is far less strict, and family discipUne and training far less careful, than they were, perhaps, in the days of our own childhood. Sunday newspapers make almost all American ministers wish they were Englishmen ; and Sunday observance among ourselves reminds one too often of that colloquy between Joshua and Moses as they were coming down from the mount during the idol-feast, when the younger said, " There is a noise of war in the camp." " No," said the elder and more discerning, " it is not the voice of them that shout for the mastery, neither is it the voice of them that cry for being overcome, but it is the voice of them that sing that I hear." Sometimes in our congregations I think it is not the shout for the mastery of the truth, pushing it upon men, it is not the voice of them that cry, in penitence and humble obedience, because they are overcome, but it is the voice of them that sing that we hear ; and the singing is too often in operatic measures, and done by quartets, not by congregations ! Talleyrand was right in saying years ago that Americans take their pleasures sadly. I think that we are right also, and more nearly right, when we say that Americans take their religion too lightly, too gaily, as if it were a varnish upon life instead of a fire and power within it. We need to meditate much more than we do on those great words that were written fifty years ago and more, on " The Ear- nest Church," written by the predecessor of our beloved and honored Dr. Dale of Birmingham : a man of such singular excel- lence, I once heard Dr. Cox say, that it required an angel hyphen- ated between the two apostles to make a name worthy of him — John Angell James. We need to meditate upon that, and to gird ourselves for more energetic service in the cause of the Master. But the human soul is still beating, and full of life, in the heart of every one whom we address ; and God's gospel has its grip on that human soul whenever it reaches it through our ministry, and lifts it nearer the things supernal, and nearer God himself. While I see many things to make us solicitous, I see nothing to make us timid, concerning these mighty advancing plans of God. If per- IN MISSIONARY WORK. 1 85 secution could not stay them, if prelacy could not finally thwart them, I do not believe that bicycles are going to override them, in the end, or that they are to find their grave in the fascinating golf-links. No ! there is One who sitteth above the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers ; and his plans go forth, soundless, silent, except as they come into operation. But they never are broken ; they never are drawn back ; and the world has to learn more and more clearly, every century, that the banners of God are those which never go down in any struggle, and that whoever walks and works with God is sure of the triumph. Then do not let us ever forget that this is the sublime interval in history between the ascension of the Master and his second coming in power and glory, to judge the world ! " In a grand and awful time," the hymn says — and I repeat it : — " We are living, we are dwelling, In a grand and awful time," when the heavens have been luminous with the splendor of the Ascension, and are destined to be luminous again with the awful glory of the coming for Judgment; and now is our time for work — for work with the energy of the Divine Spirit whose dis- pensation this is. That Spirit wrote his gospel by the inspiration of human minds, and by the instruments of human hands, on leaves of parchment and papyrus. He is writing his gospel now, at large, through his inspiration of human minds and guidance of human hands over the expanses of the continents. But it is the same gospel — the gospel of sin, the gospel of atonement, the gospel of regeneration, the gospel of future judgment, and of future glory for the believing. That is the gospel ; and we are to go with him in extending the knowledge of that and in writing it ourselves. Wheresoever we have the opportunity, that is our work ; a work greater, more momentous, wider in its relations, than any other done upon the earth. Let us not forget then the meanness, the misery and evilness, of human society, where the gospel does not enter and pervade it. 1 86 THE PERMANENT MOTIVE Let us not forget the recoverableness to God of every person and every people, if the divine energies are rightly used. Let us not forget that the gospel of Christ is the power at which men laugh and say, " You are trying to quarry mountains with sunbeams ; you are trying to lift masses of masonry with aerial or, at best, with silken threads." It is the gospel of Christ which is to be the power to lift mankind, and glorify God, on all the continents, in all the earth. The passion of love for Christ, stimulated by everything that, we read or hear, quickened by the Spirit in our hearts, is the power that is to loosen amassed wealth and make it fluent, that is to vitalize dead wealth and make it active, that is to enter into every languid heart and inspire it for service. And then the view of the Divine Providence working in history toward one result, steadily steering toward one haven and port, — the earth renewed in righteousness and ^beautiful before God ; and then this dispensation of the Spirit, in which we have our time ! After the Resurrection, a disciple said, " I go a-fishing." Like- wise said they all. It seems strange that even after that miracle, which has shot its radiance everywhere upon the history of the world, any disciple should have yielded to such an impulse. But now shall we, after the Ascension and when the skies are still glowing with it, after Pentecost has opened heavenly principali- ties and powers to our view and our experience, under the shadow of the great White Throne that is to be set in heaven — shall we go to building and bargaining, to mining and merchandising, as our chief aim in life, and omit this sublimest service which angels, it seems to me, must bend above the battlements of heaven to see in its progress, and to make their hearts and harps jubilant in its vitality and success ? Oh, my friends, let us remember, wheresoever we labor, that our errand is to make this complex, complete, energetic mission- ary motive more clear to every mind, more thoroughly vigorous and energetic in every heart. Everything else must be post- poned ! Do not let us spend our strength in picking the gospel to pieces, to see if we can't put it together again in a better fashion ! Do not let us spend our strength in any denominational controversies or collisions. Let us give ourselves, with all our IN MISSIONARY WORK. I 8/ power, to making this immense missionary motive operative throughout all the churches, throughout and in all Christian hearts ; till He shall come whose right it is to reign, and take unto himself his great power, and rule King of Nations as well as King of Saints. Let us recognize this as the one truly magnificent errand for man on the earth. Let us be filled with the Divine Spirit, that we may accomplish it the more perfectly. Let us never intermit the service. And if, as we grow older, we grow weary with cares and labors, and it may be with sorrows, and are dis- posed sometimes to think we may now rest, let us remember the word of Arnauld, the illustrious Port Royalist, whom even his passionate enemies, the Jesuits, admitted to be great, of whom it is recorded that when some one said to him, "You have labored long, now is your time to rest ! " his reply was, " Rest? Why rest, here and now, when I have a whole Eternity to rest in?" God in his grace open that tranquil and luminous Eternity to each of us, where we may rest in nobler praise and grander work, forevermore ; and unto Him be all the praise ! on Theological Scmmary-Sppef Library 1 1012 01087 9742 Date Due Mr 1 5 TA' .^^"""^"^ \m\mmmmmm »i ■mmMtm iiSH?H>irl1k«fi ,***'^,WSIWSl <|)