The Christian Gospel involves no such doctrines as are here taught by the Christian missionary. It can answer all such queries of learned Paganism, and answer them too so as to command the attention and favorable consideration of the one who proposes them. It is such a Gospel as this that Paganism needs everywhere, and such as we believe it will one day hear and faithfully accept. For nothing short of it can vindicate the ways of God to His children, and bring them to love and live for one another.

The command of Christ to the apostles, to "preach the Gospel to every creature," is a call upon all churches for missionary effort. Because the destiny of Christ's kingdom is that of universal dominion. The prophecy in Daniel is explicit, as the Lord's Messiah is predicted. "And there was given unto him dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all people, nations and languages should serve him, his dominion is an everlasting dominion which shall not pass away, and his kingdom that which shall not be destroyed. The kingdom, and dominion, and the greatness of the kingdom under the whole heaven, shall be given to the people of the saints of the Most High, whose kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and all dominions shall serve him." 1

Work has already been done, showing what yet this Christpower may effect. The brightness of the Gospel day is to have increase. Human society is to be permeated with the principles and truths of Christianity. Into social, civil and national life Christ shall be received as lawgiver and king. All that filled the prophet's eye is to be realized, when to his enraptured vision earth was seen "filled with the knowledge of the glory of God, as the waters cover the sea." 2 And that which really represents Christ and his work here is to be the instrumentality by which this glorious result shall be reached. Christ having already come in his kingdom, is here to remain, and will continue in and with his Church, until "the kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, and he shall reign forever and ever." 3

1 Daniel vii. 14, 27.

2 Isaiah xi. 9.

3 Rev. xi. 15.

This true Church looks forward, not backward. It means effort, strife, accomplishment, victory. A church that thinks otherwise, that takes a hopeless and gloomy view of the great field of Christian action that deems the world growing worse, and sin and wrong too formidable to be overcome, is not fit for this grand crusade into which Christianity summons us all. To win victories for Christ, the heart must be hopeful. It is said that Admiral Dupont was once explaining to Admiral Farragut the reasons why he failed to enter Charleston harbor with his fleet of iron clads. He gave this, and that, and the other reason. Farragut remained silent until he was through, and then said, "Ah! Dupont, there was one reason more." "What is that?" "You did not believe you could do it." A church disbelieving in the world's conversion, will fail to accomplish it. That which kept Livingstone undaunted, and bore him on through numberless perils, until he died kneeling with his hands clasped in prayer, was the thought, "Africa for Christ!"

And this grand conviction has been at work in every age of the Church's history. You witness it in the first apostles. All of them were living and active missionaries. Paul was. "All for Christ," was his conviction. He asked service, not payment; battle, not victory. How his living power has come down to us through the ages! For three centuries after him the Church had this missionary enthusiasm. They sent out their heralds to the uttermost parts of the earth then known to them. Ulphilas in the Fourth century carried the Gospel to the Goths: St. Columba, in the Sixth, to Ionia ; and Columbanus to the Swiss Lakes. In the Seventh century, Gregory sent St. Augustine to become the first archbishop of Canterbury; and when England had accepted Christianity, she sent Willibrod, in the Eighth century, to Northern Germany, and St. Boniface to the Thuringian wilds. The Scandinavian Vikings who had "become the scourge of nations and the scourge of every sea," in the Eleventh century, were won by Olaf to the faith of Christ, and the preliminary work of the missionary apostolate in Europe was effected.* "Saintly Workers," by Canon Farrar.

In the Thirteenth and Sixteenth centuries, Raymond Lulli and Francis Xavier gave evidence of a missionary enthusiasm equal to any the Christian Church has known. Their Catholicism was broader than that of any sect. They lived, wrought, suffered, and died for Christ and for Humanity.

In other days, and by other agencies, the work went on. The missionary spirit entered and filled other souls, and all sects were moved more or less by it to action. The Moravian missionaries in Greenland went with zeal into the work. Elliot and Branierd, apostles to the American Indians, and Henry Martin in the far East; Judson, Heber, Colton and Marsden, all have made luminous the pages of Christian missionary history. John Williams, the intrepid and indomitable, murdered among the heathen of Erromango, Bishop Makenzie, dying amid the malarious swamps of Zambesi, and David Livingston, the great African pioneer of this generation, and the great foe of the slave trade, breathing his last in his hut at Ulala, and leaving in his journal the Christian appeal, "Who will help to heal this open sore of the world?" These are records coming down to our time, challenging attention, and stirring us to a new sense of Christian responsibility.

We have spoken of the workers now departed, but whose works still follow them, and are fresh inducements to new efforts in the great field of missions. And this field has been widening out beyond all former bounds. On various shoreswe find the standard of the cross upreared. The Christian faith, enthusiasm, self-denial, industry, statesmanship in planning, and liberality in supporting all embodied in this one interest recognized under this one head, Foreign Missions, is worthy the profoundest attention and study of every one professing the least degree of heart interest in those burning words of the model prayer, "Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”.

Scarcely a week passes in which events are not announced in the newspapers and missionary periodicals which mark another station in the march of the Gospel. It would be well if all the churches gave more attention and thought to this

significant fact. For example, the Missionary Herald explains the changes that have been wrought in India since the first missionaries went there, remarking,

"The devoted missionary, Henry Martin, once said, that if he ever saw a Hindoo converted, it would be like seeing a dead man rise from the grave. Had he lived till this time he might have seen 500,000 such converts. Fifty years ago, a society of the most influential gentlemen was formed in Calcutta, to advocate the practice of burning widows on the funeral pile of their husbands, and they even established a paper to advocate this horrible custom. Now there is no burning of widows, no hook swinging, and the sick, the aged, and little children are no longer pushed into the Ganges. The religion of Christ, by its missionaries, has wrought these and other changes."

From Fiji the English governor of the Island writes of its inhabitants.

"Out of a population of about 120,000, 102,000 are now regular worshippers in the churches, which number 800, all well built and completed. In every family there is morning and evening worship. Over 12,000 children are in attendance in the 1,534 Christian day schools. The heathenism which still exists in the mountain districts, surrounded as it is on all sides by a Christian population on the coast, is rapidly dying out.

Facts like these are certainly an inducement to wakefulness on the part of professed friends of the Christian cause. There are those, however, in all Christian communities and congregations who are exceedingly given to drowsiness on this subject. We have quite too large a number of them in our own congregations. They do not see the utility of this foreign mission work. As one of our own thoughtful ministers not long ago wrote:

"A good deal of cheap ridicule has been heaped on heathen missions; and it has grown to be a species of cant to deride the zeal of those who pass by pagans at their own doors to waste sympathy and money on the contented ignorance of far-away barbarians." 5

5 Rev. I. M. Atwood.

But this indifference is unworthy of a mind capable of hearing and heeding the direction of our Lord, "Go ye into all the world, and preach the Gospel to every creature."

And this brings us to speak more directly in reference to the missionary enterprise, in this widest view of it, as connected with our own Church. We cannot evade the force, any more than we can the meaning of these words of the Master. We surely understand that the Gospel is for the spiritual blessing of every member of the human family. This is our Christian Universalism which we aver to the world, which we desire should be preached, and understood, and accepted by all men everywhere. We have no disposition to keep this truth of its universality in the background, while other statements of Christian truth are insisted on. It is to us one of the fundamentals; and one reason why we esteem our denominational NAME more highly than any other (while Christian sects exist), is, that the name so completely comprehends and affirms the regenerating power of Divine truth and love with every soul of mankind.

To the work of Home Missions our Church is giving a more direct attention that at any time in the past. In most of our States, where we have any considerable representation, a State Missionary is actively at work; and as the claims of this enterprise are fairly and earnestly set before our people, the reasonableness and significance of them are the more clearly seen and readily responded to. And we are satisfied that the more the need of this work is felt, the clearer will become the perception of the grand meaning of that call of the Master, "Go, teach all nations."

We are glad that our churches and denominational journals are giving heed to this call, and are beginning to discuss its bearings on our true church life and prosperity. We have noted a plea in one of our Western journals in favor of Home Missions, setting forth their claims to the exclusion, however, of an equal anxiety in behalf of the mission work abroad. The plea runs thus: Every one knows that there are millions of persons in this country who have never heard a sermon