REV. HENRY T. CHAPMAN, Secretary United Methodist Free Churches, Leeds, England.*

We are convened to consider the authority and purpose of Christian Missions. I want to keep to my text. It is said that ministers do not often do that. We have heard in our country during the past twenty years, and especially during the past ten years, this: Back to Christ; back to Christ; back from history; back from tradition; back from the apostles; back to Christ. And if there is one subject in which we need to get back in thought and heart to Jesus Christ, it is this question of foreign missions.

I will not stop to speak of that factor in the authority for missions which rests on the distinct and specific command of Jesus Christ, other than to ask you to consider one short verse in the thirteenth chapter of the Gospel according to St. Matthew-that chapter of the kingdom of heaven. Jesus Christ, in expounding the parable of the sower, said: "The field is the world, and the children of the kingdom are the seed." "The field is the world" -no section; the whole world is the field, and those who are members of the kingdom of Jesus Christ are the seed which is to be sown over that wide field of God.

But that on which I wish to spend a little more time is the factor in the responsibility, in the authority of missions which rests on the fact that the gospel of Jesus Christ can meet the deepest needs of universal man, and can fulfill the sublimest possibilities. I find in my own country that this is a point where there is much divergence of view. This is a point where many halt. We hear again and again this statement: "Yes, the gospel is suited to the humanity of the West." Your continent has given to those of us on the other side of the waters a very able book-Rev. Josiah Strong's "The New Era." In that book is worked out with great ability, the adaptation of the gospel to the Anglo-Saxon race. But then, there are China, India, Africa, and the Islands of the Sea. True, the gospel of Jesus Christ has lifted the deepest needs of the AngloSaxon race; has brought to it its richest blessings, on the intellectual, the social, and the domestic side. The gospel of Jesus Christ is suited to the development of the genius of the Anglo-Saxon race. But there is India, with its rich imagination, its power of subtle thought, its love of all that is gorgeous, and grand, and spectacular. There is China, with its genius and idiosyncrasies. There is the African race with its rich fund of mirth. Where is the proof that the gospel of Jesus Christ can meet the genius of the Hindoo, of the Chinaman? Has not the late Professor Drummond told us that China is a case of "arrested development"? There is much to be said in favor of that view. But where is the proof, that in the gospel of Jesus Christ there is the power to set moving onward to its final goal of God the arrested life of the great nation of China? I say, back from philosophy! Back from what has been done! often feel, as I read letters which come from the foreign field, that every missionary secretary ought in the first instance to have been

* Central Presbyterian Church, April 23.

a missionary, and a foreign missionary. I believe that many of our methods will have to be readjusted, and some of them entirely abandoned. But the readjustment of method, the abandonment of some improvement is quite a different thing from a failure in the gospel as the power of God unto salvation. Why am I confident that the gospel is the power of God unto salvation to India, to Africa, to China, and to the Islands of the Sea? Not to make India or China a pale, poor copy of the Anglo-Saxon; but so to work in the thought and heart of India, China, and Africa, that they shall develop that special gift of thought and heart which God has wrought in their very texture, and that they shall partake of the Divine love at last, flashing back with other nations the goodness, and wisdom, and mercy, and love of God in Jesus Christ.

I go back to Christ-I go back to Christ for my authority for this broad statement; not to a success here, a conquest there, and a triumph yonder, but I go back to the central truth of our holy religion-"God manifest in the flesh." What flesh? The flesh of the Anglo-Saxon race? We are a wonderful people-no doubt of that; but we are not the sum total of humanity, thank God! The 400,000,000, the 360,000,000, and the millions on the continent touching this continent stand for something in the thought and purpose of Almighty God. "Who do men say that I, the Son of Man, am?" The son of Abraham? The son of what man? The Chinaman? The man of India? The Anglo-Saxon man? The man of the Islands of the Sea? "Who do men say that I, the Son of Man, am?" The manhood of humanity was the flesh of Jesus Christ, and I fall back upon the humanity of Christ as my proof that the gospel of the grace of God is that which every nation needs, and which will crown every nation in the thought and purpose of Almighty God.

arms.

Let me quote just one incident, on the authority of Marcus Dods, in reference to a book in which a parallel and contrast are drawn between Buddhism and Christianity, and much to the disadvantage of Christianity. Singularly enough, the writer supplies the antidote to his own too narrow premises and mischievous deductions in that very book. He says: "One day I stood near one of the great temples. With me was a friend. While we stood there, there came a native woman, carrying a little child in her She took no notice of us, but when she got to the foot of the temple steps, she threw herself prone on the ground, holding up the baby in her arms. We looked. We saw the baby was illshapen; had none of that beauty and loveliness which characterize infant life. And then she prayed this prayer: 'Oh, grant that my child may grow fair, as other children! Grant that it may grow comely! Grant that it may grow strong! Oh, hear the cry of a mother, and a mother's breaking heart.' And her prayer was finished; and she rose and was passing away, when he who wrote the book, said, 'Friend, to whom have you prayed?'

She said:

'I don't know; but surely somewhere there must be someone to hear the cry of a mother's heart, and to keep a mother's heart from breaking!"" As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so pant

eth my soul after God, after the living God. And it is that God that can bind up broken hearts that the heathen world is waiting to be told of, and that is the authority and supreme message of Christian Missions.

BISHOP E. R. HENDRIX, D.D., Kansas City, Mo., Methodist Episcopal Chureh.*

The missionary idea is a revealed idea. This marvelous inspiration of men is due to the inspiration of God. Only a Christian brain has ever been large enough to conceive of a God great enough to love and to save a lost world, and that very conception of God comes to us through a divine revelation. Back of every great movement is a great idea. God never summoned men to missionary service or to work until first He put in them the missionary idea, and that missionary idea is inseparable from the idea of God. It was only as Paul exploited the divine nature that he found hid there the mystery that had been hid from the foundation of the world that God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself. God never sent out a missionary save from a private audience; not to give the gospel to the world until first he had an audience with Jehovah himself. It was from the presence of their risen Lord that the apostles were sent out with the great commission ringing in their ears. It was only as he saw the divine Christ glorified that Paul obtained that commission that made him the world's greatest missionary. The missionary idea is there distinctly the supernatural idea, as much so as the idea of the resurrection of the body. It is because this idea is supernatural and revealed, contained in the Word of God, that men go forth with that commission in their hands, and with that revelation, the very center of which is Christ.

The missionary idea is not only a supernatural idea, but it is eminently a Christian idea. It comes to us from the very lips of the Son of God. He alone, the Son of Man, proclaiming Himself the brother of man everywhere, bids His disciples to be possessed of His spirit and of His word, and to go into all the world and to give this gospel to every creature.

Moreover, it is the fundamental idea of our religion. It is the great fly-wheel that starts all the machinery of the Church. Our Lord gave but one command, and out of that command all of our institutional Christianity has sprung; out of it your Bible Societies, to print the Word; out of it your missionary Societies, to send forth laborers, and out of it your great Church Building, and Church Extension Societies; out of it your colleges; out of it your revivals of religion.

Andrew Fuller, when alarmed at the spiritual lethargy of his church, preached a sermon on the duty of the Church to give the gospel to the world, and as he broadened their intellectual life and quickened their zeal, and stirred their purpose, he followed it up the following Sabbath with a sermon on the duty of the Church to give the gospel to the world; the third Sabbath the same theme was pre*Carnegie Hall, April 24.

sented from his desk, and then men began to inquire: "Then, if the gospel can save the world, can it not save our own children, our own community?" and from that missionary sermon there sprang one of the most memorable revivals in the history of any church. It is the carrying power of the gospel that carries it into all the world, that is able to save all the world. The Son of God fixed our eye upon that last man that we might see between us and Him every other man. This makes our religion, based upon this fundamental conception, world-wide. The Church has no other purpose in existence; no other end to serve, save the conviction of believers, but this great end of giving the gospel to the world. The three things that belong to man which belong to no other of God's earthly creatures, are his religious feeling, his moral sense, and his perception of the sublime. And it is the missionary idea that appeals to them all. Man's religious feeling is an awakened sense of obligation in the work that is set before him; vast in conception, difficult in execution, the very element of the sublime belonging to it. In the carrying out of that, man himself rises to his true greatness. I do not wonder that Judson was eulogized by Theodore Parker in language like this, when he said that if all that had ever been given for missions, all that had been done for missions, had produced only one such character as Adoniram Judson, it would have been worth the expenditure. It was that deepened religious life, it was that large sense of moral obligation, and it was that kindled sense of the sublime, that bade him go forth, a map of the world in his hand, in full confidence that that great field should be triangulated and occupied in the name of his Lord and Master.

The Supreme and Determining Aim

ROBERT E. SPEER, M.A., Secretary Board of Foreign Missions, Presbyterian Church in U. S. A.*

It is the aim of foreign missions that is to be defined, and not the aim of the Christian Church in the world, or of the Christian nations of the world. There are many good and Christian things. which it is not the duty of the foreign missionary enterprise to do. Some things are to be laid, from the beginning, upon the shoulders of the new Christians; some are to be left to be discharged in due time by the native Christian churches that shall arise, and there are many blessings, political, commercial, and philanthropic, which the Christian nations owe to the heathen world, which are not to It is the aim be paid through the enterprise of foreign missions.

of a distinctive, specific movement that we are to consider.

It will help us in defining it to remind ourselves, for one thing, that we must not confuse the aim of foreign missions with the results of foreign missions. There is no force in the world so powerful to accomplish accessory results as the work of missions. Wherever it goes it plants in the hearts of men forces that produce new lives; it plants among communities of men forces that create new social combinations. It is impossible that any human tyranny

Carnegie Hall, April 23.

should live where Jesus Christ is King. All these things the foreign mission movement accomplishes; it does not aim to accomplish them. I read in a missionary paper a little while ago that the foreign mission that was to accomplish results of permanent value must aim at the total reorganization of the whole social fabric. This is a mischievous doctrine. We learn nothing from human history, from the experience of the Christian Church, from the example of our Lord and His apostles to justify it. They did not aim directly at such an end. They were content to aim at implanting the life of Christ in the hearts of men, and were willing to leave the consequences to the care of God. It is a dangerous thing to charge ourselves openly before the world with the aim of reorganizing States and reconstructing society. How long could the missions live, in the Turkish Empire or the Native States of India, that openly proclaimed their aim to be the political reformation of the lands to which they went? It is misleading, also, as Dr. Behrends once declared, to confuse the ultimate issues with the immediate aims; and it is not only misleading, it is fatal. Some things can only be secured by those who do not seek them. Missions are powerful to transform the face of society, because they ignore the face of society and deal with it at its heart. They yield such powerful political and social results because they do not concern themselves with them.

It will help us also to remind ourselves that we must not confuse the aims of missions with the methods of missions. It is an easy

thing to select a method with a view to the accomplishment of some given end, and then, because the end is difficult of accomplishment, because the method is easy of operation, because its results, apart altogether from the main aim, are pleasant and useful in themselves, it is easy to exalt the method into the place of the end. Have not many of us seen this same happen, to be quite frank, in our schools? We establish a school with a view to the realization of our aim; the aim becomes a difficult thing, the maintenance of the school is an easy thing. It is a good and civilizing thing in itself, and by and by we sacrifice for the lesser good the greater aim. Our method rises up into the place of our end and appropriates to its support for its own sake that which the aim had a right to claim. should be devoted to it for the aim's sake alone. Let us once and for all distinguish in our minds between the aim of missions and the results and methods of missions.

Having cleared the ground so far, what is the aim of foreign missions? For one thing, it is a religious aim. We can not state too strongly in an age when the thought of men is full of things, and the body has crept up on the throne of the soul, that our work is not immediately and in itself a philanthropic work, a political work, a secular work of any sort whatsoever; it is a spiritual and a religious work. Of course, religion must express itself in life, but religion is spiritual life. I had rather plant one seed of the life of Christ under the crust of heathen life than cover that whole crust over with the veneer of our social habits or the vestiture of Western civilization. We go into the world not primarily as trustees