The daily morning journal and courier., 1897-10-14

more ethical, humane, progressive, life giving than the types of the Oriental churches and of the national European establishments. America's place in Christianizing the world is far ahead of the very foremost ranks. We have the greatest wealth of all nations; here Christianity has free field for the ex- ercise of it's divine energies; here the sense of individual responsibility has been developed, and God has placed us, like Israel of old, in the center of na- tions, touching Englands greatest col ony on the north, and the whole Span ish world reaching from the Rio Grande to Cape Horn on the south, while to the west of us is the Asiatic world of inn measurable greatness which. when awakened out of sleep, will combine with America to make the Pacific ocean the chief highway of the worlds com merce.
 And one does not feel that America grows less important as after eighty days of voyaging in mid-ocean, or skirting the shores of great continents, he comes to realize the earth's bigness, and the multitude of interests which lie outside of our own land. Before two centuries have passed away the Eng fish language will be the vehicle of commerce, literature and civilization for the majority of the human race. Many time in my conversations with English people I have startled them with new fact, and a new fact is usually disturbing to the British mind, namely, that over one-half of those who now speak the English tongue live beneath the stars and stripes.
 Under the divine constraint of Christ to man, to preach the gospel to every creature, have gone around the globe, and believing that His command is a perpetual obligation to His disciples have returned to speak to the heart and conscience of that people which has been divinely chosen to become the great missionary nation of the world. There is nothing fantastic or unreal in the missionary purposes which fill your hearts tonight. The century we live
 in is illustrious as the time when the Church of Christ so enlarged her tenets
 as to present the appearance of uni
 versal faith. The strongest argument
 for our religion which I was able to bring to the Hindu mind is the essential |universality of the Christian gospel, not
 only it's adaptation to all men and its claims upon all but in it's worldwide extension, an argument which modern
 missions have put into our hands. It IS strange to me that any world travel
 CT should be willing or able to miss from his view the fruits of this wide-
 reaching evangelism. I have found them everywhere, beneath the internal
 gloom which broods over Constantino-
 pie, in schools and churches which the sultan ought never to have admitted to
 his empire if the Ottoman government
 saw that a pure Christianity would
 work out it's inevitable results and
 made human being dissatisfied with ig-
 norance, robbery, oppression and whole sale assassination. have seen the fruit age of Christian missionary work in the
 cities and mud villages along the Nile,
 where the impoverished remnants of population whose ancestors may have
 built pyramids are coming out into spiritual liberty and independence for which Pharaohs and Ptolemys, Calophs and Khedives never made provision. I
 have seen Christian missions every
 where, in more than a score of the
 crowded cities of India, totiching with
 the light of the gospel the minds of the
 little children in the schools, and the restless youth in the colleges sounding it's message in the brilliant and dusty
 bazaars, and bringing the hand of med ical skill and the voice of Christian consolation to the wards of man a hos pital. Christian schools look out upon the eternal snows of the Himalayas and the everlasting verdure mantling the forest-covered hills and rice-cover- ed plains of Ceylon. I have found the Christian herald at work where the is- land of Singapore keeps watch between the Pacific and Indian seas, and where the mountain islands of Hong Kong guard one of the chief harbors of China and the fourth port of the world, and where the islands of Japan are to be-
 come more beautiful with the leaves of the gospel than with the cherry blos- soms in the spring time.
 My observations and studies. as well
 as my Christian labors were largely
 given to India. China in all probabil- ity, is the chief Asiatic people of the future, but India's intellectual great
 ness, her present sufferings, the variety of her spiritual phenomena and her racial kinships with ourselves give to her peculiar interest and importance. The missionary problems met with in
 India China and Japan are by no
 means the same. These three peoples
 are all Asiatic, but Asiatic is vague and misleading word. Some modern scholars, and particularly some Hindu reformers, like Keshub Chunder Sen.
 have fallen into error in their general
 izations about Asia. They have made
 the term Asiatic to include whatever is found within the compass of Asiatic
 geography. They have held it up as
 something distinct from all that is Flu
 ropean and western, and have given to it a unity that does not belong to it.
 They have contrasted Asiatic mysti-
 cism with European science, Asiatic
 mildness with European ferocity, Asi- atic idealism with European material ism, Asiatic righteousness with Europe
 an impiety, Asiatic unworldiness with European avarice. and thus have made for themselves and others misleading picture. For, in the first place, Asia has far less unity than Europe and America for these are unitized by Christianity, the Graeco-Roman civili- zation and science. There is common