First World War Centennial

V

THE WAR AIMS AND FOREIGN MISSIONS

The war was so big and it is still so near that it is not possible yet to comprehend it. It has a thousand faces which we shall be studying all the rest of our lives and centuries will have to pass before men can see it in its true perspective and proportion. But some things about it are already sufficiently clear. And one of them is that the war was the greatest proclamation of foreign missions which we have ever heard.

It is interesting to mark the way in which, one after another, the great ideas and principles of the missionary enterprise were taken over and declared by the nation as its moral aims in the war. If we will review these aims we shall see how completely they have been accepted from the foreign missionary undertaking. There ought not to be any doubt or misgiving in our minds as to what the aims were which, as we believed, justified us in what we did, and which, if they were valid during the war, as they were, are equally valid now; for certainly what we fought for in the war we have no right to re­pudiate now in peace.

What was it for which we fought in the war? To avoid reading back into the struggle moral aims which are an afterthought and which are imagined into the struggle for apologetic or homiletic purposes, let me re­call words written in the midst of the war times, when we were striving to see clearly our present duty without thought of any later moral inferences that might be drawn from the statements of duty that then satisfied us. These words were written with no reference to foreign missions but with a view to defining for the Christian conscience the purposes which warranted the war. This was the statement:

There ought to be no doubt among Christian men as to what we are fighting for in the war,—as to the great moral and spiritual ends which justify it.

We are fighting to put an end, if we can, to war and to the burden and terror of armaments. It cannot be too often said that it is a war against war that we are waging. Both mili­tarists and pacifists often deride this idea, the former because they do not think that war can be or perhaps ought to be destroyed, the latter because they do not believe that war can ever be ended by war. But there are millions of men who hate war and believe it must be ended and who are able with conscience and determination to support this war because it seems to them unavoidable and necessary as a struggle directly aimed at war itself. They did not want war. The precipitation of the war by Germany outraged all their deepest convictions. And the principles and convictions and practices as to the nature and method of war on the part of Germany seem to these millions of men to be intolerable on our earth. To give them unhindered room would make the world an impossible home for free and friendly men. They must be destroyed. War against them is war against war. It is war for peace.

This purpose also nerves the men at the front on whom the burden falls heaviest. They see the irrationality and wicked­ness of war more clearly than any one else. What sustains them is the thought that they are enduring it so that no one else may have to endure it. The thing is so dreadful that it is worth every sacrifice to slay it and to make sure that the world will not have to go through it again.

We are fighting against aggressive autocracy. Not yet against autocracy itself. We disbelieve in it and we fear it, but if any nation wants it for itself and can have it without letting it imperil all other nations thus far we have said that we have no right to interfere. It is not our business. Each people has the right of self-government. But we cannot sit quiet and let autocracy, unwilling to stay at home, go abroad to rule the world. It is the strong nation invading other nations, attack­ing the rights of humanity, perpetrating wrong and injustice, that must be resisted and bound to keep the peace, just as the strong man breaking the laws of society and perpetrating wrong and injustice in the state must be bound to desist from wrong.

We are fighting against the claim of nations to be above the moral law. A state cannot endure if one class of its citizens is allowed to excuse itself from the moral obligations which bind all others. And the world cannot endure if any nation is allowed to set itself above the principles of truth and justice and righteousness which have their ground in the character of God and which are the foundation of individual life and must be the foundation of international life and of international relationship. It is moral anarchy for any nation to set itself and its interests above the laws of God, which are laws of universal right and justice.

We are fighting against the idea of power as its own law, against the ancient claim of might to be its own right. This idea, if yielded to, puts an end to civilization. If we merely match might with might and try to disprove the claims of might by superior might we support the very law we attack. But if we use might for right and hold it subject to right, and repudiate utterly the principle that it is or can be anything apart from right, we may safely and we must unyieldingly oppose what strength we have or can get from God against the falsehood of power as its own warrant for aught that it can do. The very essence of evil is in this falsehood and must be destroyed.

And we are not only fighting against great falsehoods and wrong, we are fighting for a new world order of concord and peace and justice. Just as in each nation the elements which had to be combined were compelled to give up their separate claim to the end that a righteous and stable political order could be established, so now we realize that the world must in some simple and practical way be reorganized to provide some in­strumentality of international justice which will settle difficulties by peaceful, judicial processes, as men settle their difficulties among themselves without murder or any violence. To carry mankind forward by such a big advance is worth any sacrifice necessary to win it.

All of these things ought to have been won without war. They have not been. Against our wills the great war which involves these issues came out and laid hold upon us and, whether we would or no, we had to take up our part. And now that duty cannot be played with. Asking God for His forgiveness for all that has been wrong in ourselves, humbly trusting His grace and seeking His strength, we are to take up our task in the spirit of those who know only one fidelity, the fidelity that knows no yielding until its task is done. Without hate or pride or wrong-doing, without using against evil the evil we deplore, without malice toward any one and with charity toward all men, including our foes, with patience and tenacity and deathless devotion, we are to do the work that has come to us until it is done and done to last.

It is the business of the Church to keep clear and unconfused these moral ends which alone justify the war, to warn men against hate and evil will, to strengthen in men's hearts the sense of deathless devotion to duty, to encourage faith in the possibility of establishing on the earth a righteous order worth living and dying for, to show men that they must and can behave now as citizens in a manner worthy of the Gospel of Christ, to maintain in the soul of the nation an unswerving loyalty to righteousness and a fearless love of all humanity, to make the nation humble and penitent before God, and to summon it to such obedience to God's holy law that it can confidently offer itself to Him for the accomplishment of His purposes of justice and truth.

Here were five clear moral aims; to put an end to war, and the fear of war and the burden of arma­ments, to assure human freedom, to assert and establish the principle of international righteousness, to use strength for human service, to prepare the way for an order of truth and justice and brotherhood. As the war went on these aims grew clearer and firmer. (i) "This is a war to end war" became a universal watchword. The military spirit which kindled and flamed in human hearts blazed most fiercely against militarism, and re­pudiated with deepening horror and loathing the whole philosophy of war, its colossal inefficiency and its exorbi­tant waste. (2) The indignation against the autocratic governments which were responsible for the war, although at first this indignation proclaimed no doom upon autoc­racy as a political theory, came gradually to realize that autocracy can not confine itself to any bounds and is not able to be harmless. The spread of the spirit of liberty of itself overthrew one by one all the autocracies that entered the war. (3) The nation saw with increasing clearness that wrong is wrong no matter who perpe­trates it, whether a nation or a man, and likewise that the duty of service and protection is a national as well as a personal duty. (4) The war became a great enter­prise of human service. Nations fed one another and stood ready to die for one another and for the safety of mankind. (5) And above all as time went on men realized that they were in this struggle for the sake of what lies ahead of us, for the hope of a new human order—an order of righteousness and of justice and of brotherhood. If it were not for that hope ahead, all the arguments that spring from what lies behind would not have been enough to sustain men. Once men had got into their minds that the same thing was going to be afterward that was before, the war would have been over that day or the next. Men were not going into the war and dying for the sake of punishing somebody for what lay behind alone, or for the sake of executing venge­ance for great wrongs. You cannot sustain sacrifices like these or memories. They must be sustained on great expectations. Even our Lord, Himself, was upheld by what lay before Him, "Who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising shame, and hath sat down at the right hand of the throne of God."

I have named just as briefly as I could what seem to me to be five of the great moral justifications for the war, justifications that made legitimate the sacrifices that were poured out, and that laid the obligation of the struggle to the last effort upon every life in our land. But, when we have said this, have we said anything more than just to put into political terms, in connection with the great struggle, the aims and ideals and purposes for which many men have been living all their lives, which have actuated the missionary enterprise, and which under­lie it to-day? What does that enterprise exist for? What has it been seeking to do, and in reality doing all the years since it began?

It has been in the world as an instrumentality of peace and international good will. Wherever it has gone, it has erased racial prejudice and bitterness, the great root of international conflict and struggle. It has helped men to understand one another. It has rubbed off the fric­tions. "Christianity continues to spread among the Karens," said the Administration Report for British Burmah for 1880–1881, "to the great advantage of the Commonwealth, and the Christian Karen communities are distinctly more industrious, better educated and more law-abiding than the Burman and Karen villages around them. The Karen race and the British government owe a great debt to the American missionaries who have, under Providence, wrought this change among the Karens of Burmah." At the outset of missionary work in India, Schwartz had illustrated this power of missions, com­manding the confidence of the people, and securing peace and order where the East India Company and the native rulers themselves were helpless. "Send me none of your agents," Hyder Ali said to the Company in some of their negotiations. "Send me the Christian missionary, Schwartz, and I will receive him." "To be welcomed in the land of cannibals," said a Dutch traveler in Sumatra, Lunbing Hirum, "by children singing hymns, this indeed shows the peace-creating power of the gospel." "The benefits" (of the missionary work in New Guinea), said Hugh Milman, a magistrate, "are immense; inter-tribal fights formerly so common, being entirely at an end, and trading and communication, one tribe with another, now being carried on without fear."

Missionaries have been a conciliatory influence again and again, and have allayed hostility which diplomats and traders have aroused. They did this in Japan. The Fiji Shimpo, one of the leading newspapers in Japan, spoke of this in advocating the sending of Buddhist mis­sionaries to Korea. "Japanese visiting Korea will be chiefly bent upon the pursuit of gain and will not be disposed to pay much attention to the sentiments and customs of the Koreans or to allow their spirit to be controlled by any consideration of the country or the people. That was the case with foreigners in the early days of Japan's intercourse with them, and there can be no doubt that many serious troubles would have occurred had not the Christian missionary acted as a counter­balancing influence. The Christian missionary not only showed to the Japanese the altruistic side of the Occi­dental character, but also by his teaching and his preach­ing imparted a new and attractive aspect to intercourse which would otherwise have seemed masterful and re­pellent. The Japanese cannot thank the Christian mis­sionary too much for the admirable leaven that he intro­duced into their relations with foreigners, nor can they do better than follow the example that he has set, in their own intercourse with the Koreans."

And missionaries in the same conciliatory spirit have been the main factors in opening some sealed lands to international intercourse. The United States Govern­ment's treaty with Siam was negotiated in 1856, and Dr. Wood of the Embassy wrote that "the unselfish kindness of the American missionaries, their patience, sincerity and faithfulness, have won the confidence and esteem of the natives, and in some degree transferred those sentiments to the nation represented by the mission­ary and prepared the way for the free and national inter­course now commencing. It was very evident that much of the apprehension they felt in taking upon themselves the responsibilities of a treaty with us would be dimin­ished if they could have the Rev. Mr. Mattoon as the first United States Consul to set the treaty in motion." In 1871, the Regent of Siam frankly told Mr. Seward, the United States Consul-General at Shanghai, "Siam has not been disciplined by English and French guns as China has, but the country has been opened by mission­aries."

Of the work of the Scotch Presbyterians in Nyassa land, Joseph Thomson, the traveler, bore testimony after his visit in 1879. "Where international effort has failed," he said, "an unassuming Mission, supported only by a small section of the British people, has been quietly and unostentatiously, but most successfully realizing in its own district the entire program of the Brussels Confer­ence. I refer to the Livingstonia Mission of the Free Church of Scotland. This Mission has proved itself, in every sense of the word, a civilizing center. By it slav­ery has been stopped, desolating wars put an end to, and peace and security given to a wide area of the country." For a hundred years the missionary enterprise has been doing this over the entire world, getting men acquainted with one another, showing the unselfishness that lies behind much that seems to be and often is so purely selfish. It has always been and is to-day an enterprise of tranquillity and of peace.

It has been an agency of righteousness. As the years have gone by, it alone has represented in many non-Christian lands the inner moral character of the Western world. By our political agencies and activities we have forced great wrongs upon the non-Christian peoples—commercial exploitation, the liquor traffic, and the slave trade upon Africa and the South Sea Islands, the opium traffic upon China. Against these things the one element of the West that has made protest has been the mission­ary enterprise. Year after year in those lands it has joined with what wholesome moral sentiment existed among the people in a death struggle against the great iniquities that Western civilization had spread over the world. It has been an instrumentality of international righteousness.

It has been and is a great instrumentality of human service. It has scattered tens of thousands of men and women over many lands, teaching school in city and country, in town and village. It has built its hospitals by the thousand. It has sent its medical missionaries to deal every year with millions of sick and diseased peoples in Asia and Africa. It has been the one great, con­tinuing, unselfish agency of unquestioning, loving, human service throughout the world, dealing not with emergency needs of famine and flood and pestilence alone, but, year in and year out, serving all human need and seeking to introduce into human society the creative and healing influences of Christ. "It is they" (the missionaries) , says Sir H. H. Johnston, of British Central Africa, "who in many cases have first taught the natives carpentry, joinery, masonry, tailoring, cobbling, engineering, book­keeping, printing, and European cookery; to say nothing of reading, writing, arithmetic, and a smattering of general knowledge. Almost invariably, it has been to mission­aries that the natives of Interior Africa have owed their first acquaintance with a printing press, the turning-lathe, the mangle, the flat-iron, the sawmill, and the brick mold. Industrial teaching is coming more and more in favor, and its immediate results in British Central Africa have been most encouraging. Instead of importing painters, carpenters, store clerks, cooks, telegraphists, gar­deners, natural history collectors from England or India, we are gradually becoming able to obtain them amongst the natives of the country, who are trained in the mission­aries' schools, and who having been given simple, whole­some local education, have not had their heads turned, and are not above their station in life."

Let any one who doubts the constructive influence of missions in molding the social life, in affecting insti­tutions, in establishing just trade, in creating and foster­ing industries, in making friendly producers and con­sumers, in purifying morality and elevating mankind, turn to the second volume of Dr. Dennis's "Christian Missions and Social Progress," and read there of the achievements of mission work in these spheres, and he will gain a new conception of the power and value of foreign missions. As Dr. Dennis shows, they have pro­moted temperance, opposed the liquor and opium traffics which are fatal to wise commerce, checked gambling, established higher standards of personal purity, culti­vated industry and frugality, elevated woman, restrained anti-social customs such as polygamy, concubinage, adul­tery and child-marriage and infanticide, fostered the sup­pression of the slave trade and slave traffic, abolished cannibalism and human sacrifice and cruelty, organized famine relief, improved husbandry and agriculture, intro­duced Western medicines and medical science, founded leper asylums and colonies, promoted cleanliness and sani­tation, and checked war. "Whatever you may be told to the contrary," said Sir Bartle Frere, formerly Governor of Bombay, "the teaching of Christianity among 160,000,000 of civilized, industrious Hindus and Mohammedans in India is effecting changes, moral, social and political, which for extent and rapidity of effect are far more extraordinary than anything that you or your fathers have witnessed in modern Europe." "When the history of the great African States of the future comes to be written," says Sir H. H. Johnston, bearing witness out of ample personal knowledge and experience, "the ar­rival of the first missionary will with many of these new nations be the first historical event in their annals."

Foreign missions have been a great agency of human unity and concord. They, at least, have believed and acted upon the belief that all men belong to one family. They have laughed at racial discords and prejudices. They have made themselves unpopular with many repre­sentatives of the Western nations who have gone into the non-Christian world, because they have not been willing to foster racial distrust, because they have insisted on bridging the divisions which separated men of different bloods and different nationalities. We are talking now about building the new world after the war. But it would be hopeless if we had not already begun it. We are talking about some form of international organiza­tion. It may need to be very simple, with few and primitive functions, but it must come. And it can come only as first, we sustain in men's hearts a faith in its possibility; as second, we devise the instrumentalities necessary to it and make them effective; as third, we build up a spirit that will support it. Across the world for a hundred years the missionary enterprise has been the proclamation that this day must come, and that some such international body of relationships as this, based on right principles, must be set up among the nations of the world.

It would not be hard to go on analyzing further what the missionary enterprise has been doing. It has been doing peacefully, constructively, unselfishly, quietly for a hundred years exactly the things that now, in a great outburst of titanic and necessarily destructive struggle, we were compelled to do by war. I say it again, that one of the most significant things of the day is to see how the great ideals and purposes of the missionary enterprise, that have been the commonplaces of some men's lives, have been gathered up as a great moral discovery and made the legitimate moral aims of the nation in the great conflict in which we have been engaged.

And now that the war is done the question looks at us squarely. Do we mean all that we said and fought for? If we were right then are we not bound to go straight on now and do by life in peace what we were ready to do by death in war? The need for achieving the things we fought for is here to-day all over the world. The missionary enterprise is the honest effort to achieve them.

And we need the missionary enterprise now, strong, living, aggressive; first of all because we require, more than we have ever required them in the past, every pos­sible agency of international good will and interpreta­tion. Why did that happen in Russia that did hap­pen, prolonging for many months the great struggle? We know why it happened—m part at least because of a lack of adequate interpretation of our own true ideals and national character. Men who had lived here in our own land, had gone back to Russia by the hundred, to misrepresent America. They said we were a capitalistic oligarchy, not a democracy, that privilege and not justice ruled our life. I suppose Trotsky had never been in a company of two hundred real Ameri­cans. He returned to Russia, not knowing the least thing of the real spirit of the American nation and our true political ideals, and the real heart of the American people; and the same ignorance which he carried back with him is in no small measure spread far and wide over the world to-day. There could have been nothing more unwise than the proposition that we should recall in the war from Africa and India, Japan and China the men who are correctly interpreting to the non-Christian world the unselfish Christian ideals of our Western nations. In the early years of the war our Government sent to the consuls in China especially word that Americans ought not to come home; that if ever they were needed there, they were needed to-day that they might correctly represent what the moral purposes of America are, and that by their good will and friendliness, they might be true ambassadors of our spirit. We need not less to-day, but more than ever, the shuttles of sympathy and service that fly to and fro across the chasms of race. The mis­understandings of the world are a tragic thing. We little realize how deep and terrible they are; the innumer­able millions of men on the other side of the world whose minds are unknown to us and to whom what we are thinking is unknown, in whose thought there has never entered the conviction of our unselfish interest in the whole human family, and of our desire not to injure but to benefit both ourselves and with us all mankind. As never before in the history of the world, we require every possible agency of interpretation, of international fellowship and brotherhood to be thrown across the chasms that separate the races and nations of men.

President Wilson understood this. At the height of the war he wrote to a medical missionary who had asked his advice as to returning to China or entering the war: "I feel that I am by no means qualified to answer the question you put in your letter of March 9th, but it is clear to me on general principles that we must not rob effort everywhere else in order to concentrate it in France, unless it is absolutely necessary to do so. It does not appear necessary at this juncture, and my judgment, diffidently expressed, would be that your duty still lay in China."

And he had earlier written to some missionary workers in the South an equally strong statement:

"I entirely agree with you in regard to the missionary work. I think it would be a real misfortune, a misfortune of lasting consequence, if the missionary program for the world should be interrupted. There are many calls for money, of course, and I can quite understand that it may become more difficult than ever to obtain money for missionary enterprises, but that the work undertaken should be continued and continued . . . at its full force, seems to me of capital necessity, and I for one hope that there may be no slackening or recession of any sort.

"I wish that I had time to write you as fully as this great subject demands, but I have put my whole thought into these few sentences and I hope you will feel at liberty to use this expression of opinion in any way that you think best."

We are needing to prepare for the great undertakings of peace that are now upon us. It may or may not be a true principle that in times of peace we should prepare for war; but there cannot be any doubt about its being a true principle, that in times both of war and of peace we should prepare for peace. In time of peace war may or may not come, but in time of war peace must and will come. And now that peace has come, whatever may be the decision regarding the continuance of arma­ments, there can be no doubt that our immediate duty is to confront the tasks of peace. Unless those tasks are met, any preparations for the future will rest on hollow foundations. Other agencies of sinister purpose were preparing diligently throughout the whole period of the war for this present time. And they are not relaxing their purposes to-day. Against these and all evil forces every energy of righteousness must be aroused both in America and throughout the world. Every unselfish purpose, the full measure of moral consecration, the uplift and inspiration of every great ideal and of unlimited tasks must be taken advantage of now if the soul of the nation is to be equal to its responsibility. We need every ounce of moral and spiritual resolution for the nation's sake. Whatever we subtract from the spiritual outgoing of the Christian Church we subtract from the vitality of the nation in its present struggle.

Necessary as the great negative energies of destruction are, they can never achieve the things that have to be done in the world. This business of war has been an unavoidable business, but its result is to work structural changes. We cannot say that it cannot work any organic change, but if it does it is by reason of the thought which it embodies. Such work has to be done by great prin­ciples, by living ideals, by the Spirit of God. Mere mechanisms, the thunder of guns, the massing of bodies of men never can do it. They can build walls against the onset of wrong; they cannot replace it. We have to let loose the creative and constructive spiritual powers if that is to be done, and there is no creative and con­structive spiritual power the equal of that which Christ released.

And in Christ alone to-day is the power of saving men and of redeeming society. To give Him to the world is to do the work the world needs more than it needs anything else. No man can do better with his life to-day or accomplish more for the world than by going out to acquaint men with Christ and to lead all nations to obey and follow Christ as Saviour and Lord.

The Christian churches throughout the war manifested the spirit which must now have yet freer and richer play. Both in Canada and in Great Britain the foreign mis­sionary societies year after year during the war closed their books not only without a deficit but in many cases with a surplus and with larger receipts than had ever come to them before. Our American foreign mission boards had the same experience. The year of the war was with many of them the year of the most generous sup­port of their work that they had ever known.

Indeed, the work of foreign missions has never been stopped by war. The great Foreign Missionary So­cieties of Great Britain were launched in the midst of European wars, and if the earlier missionaries from the Continent had waited for times of world peace before setting out on their undertakings, they might never have gone. The first foreign missionaries from the United States, sent out by the American Board, sailed during the year of 1812. If the Church could ever be justified in waiving her missionary duty in times of national diffi­culty it would have been during the Civil War. The Southern Presbyterian Church projected its foreign mis­sionary work then. To quote Dr. Houston's words, in a noble address delivered in Philadelphia in May, 1888, "When in that day she found herself girt about as with a wall of fire, when no missionary had it in his power to go forth from her bosom to the regions beyond, the first General Assembly put on record the solemn declara­tion that, as this Church now unfurled her banner to the world, she desired distinctly and deliberately to in­scribe on it, 'in immediate connection with the Headship of her Lord, His last command, "Go ye into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature," regard­ing this as the great end of her organization, and obedience to it as the indispensable condition of her Lord's promised presence.'" And the moment the way was opened she sent forth her sons and her daughters.

The experience of the missionary board of one of the churches in the Northern States during the Civil War is illustrative, I believe, of almost all. In the spring of 1862 the Northern Presbyterian Board reported that instead of ending the year with a heavy debt, as was seriously feared, it had been able to "support the Missions in nearly all cases in their usual vigor, to send out new laborers, to occupy new ground in some instances, and to close the year in a satisfactory manner." The Board expressed the hope "that a not less vigorous support of this work will be afforded in the coming year, and the trying discipline of Divine Providence and especially the influences of the Holy Spirit may lead our churches to reach still higher standards of giving." The Board ap­pealed accordingly for an increase of 25 per cent, in the gifts of the churches, in order that the work of the Mis­sions might not be reduced nor new missionaries kept at home. The General Assembly welcomed these views and rejoiced in the fact that the largest number of mis­sionary candidates ever reported was waiting to be sent forth. The following year the Board reported that none of the new missionary candidates had been kept at home except for health or similar reasons. When the Board appealed to young men and women not to allow the im­pression that the funds of the Board would not permit them to be sent out to be made a rule of duty or to hinder them from offering themselves to the missionary service, the General Assembly endorsed this view, and in the Spring of 1864 declared: "New Missions are needed. Shall they be established? Is it inquired, Where are the means? We answer. They are in the hands of the Christians, who are God's stewards. Let a proper demand be made. Let this Assembly call on the churches, and that call will be answered. The response will come to us in the spirit of that consecration in which all God's people have laid themselves and their all upon His altar. In the opinion of the General Assembly, the Presbyte­rian Church under its care should, during the ensuing year, increase the amount of funds put under the com­mand of the Board of Foreign Missions, for the spread of the Gospel among the heathen, to not less than three hundred thousand dollars." As the war drew to a close the Board reported that never in its history had there been times when the financial prospects appeared so dark. The rates of exchange cut the value of the Ameri­can bills in half. But the light broke through the dark­ness, and the Board reported in 1865, "It has not been necessary to break up any of the Missions, to recall any of the missionaries nor to keep at home for pecuniary reasons any of the brethren who desired to be sent forth on this service."

The Christian conscience of the nation during the days of the Civil War saw in the generous outpouring of life at the call of the nation not a reason for exemption, but a ground of appeal in the matter of missionary service. The Presbyterian General Assembly of 1865 resolved "That the work of Foreign Missions calls for expansion. The prayers and wants of our brethren in the field, the field itself white to the harvest, the loss occasioned by age, infirmity and death among the laborers, all appeal for an increase of men and means; while the voice of God's providence, in His favor to this work, clearly says to His Church 'Go forward.' The promptness, energy and abundance with which our young men have come forward during the past year to engage in our armies for the defense of our nation . . . should encourage Christians to pray for that increased devotion of our sons to the service of Christ, which is demanded to provide ministers and missionaries to go into the fields which are now open to hear the Gospel."

The Church to-day cannot be justified in sinking to a lower measure of courage and devotion than marked our fathers in the days following the Civil War. The nation is vastly richer now than then, and abundantly able to meet every obligation, first among them its obligations to God and the Gospel. There are men enough and to spare for all the work that needs to be done—fore­most the great constructive work of spreading Christ's message of peace and good will among the nations, and planting everywhere the principles of the Gospel. The increase of suffering on account of war does not diminish the chronic suffering of Asia and Africa. The hungry of these lands are not less hungry because there is want in Europe as well. Preachers of the Gospel, medical missionaries, teachers and friends of mankind who will serve the needy in the spirit of Christ are more needed throughout the non-Christian world to-day than they were before the war. And while all other duties must be done, these primary and continuing duties must not be left undone. The nation will be stronger for its task at home if it is faithful to its ministries of peace to all the world.

And now will the men and women who have lives to give act upon a pinched and withholding principle? Can we believe that the men who were willing to give their lives for the nation and the cause in the war will not be willing to give them for Christ and the world and this work now that the war is done? It is inconceivable that it should be so. The men who unselfishly gave themselves to the cause to which God called the nation and who in that cause counted everything loss—who deemed life itself merely the reasonable offering which it was their duty and joy to make—will not now, surely, when the war is done, be content to turn aside to selfish and easy lives. Surely they will want to carry forward in the days of peace the same ideals for which they con­tended in the time of war—the ideals of human brother­hood, of international justice and service, of peace and good will.

And now is the time when men should face this issue of the principles by which they are going to live in peace times. Now is the time when thousands of men who have learned the unworthiness of selfish lives should resolve to give themselves to the Christian ministry, to missionary and social service, and to careers of philan­thropic and political and religious consecration. Millions of young Americans went on a foreign mission to northern France. Thousands of these men should go forth, now that the war is over, on the foreign mission of peace to Asia and Africa and Latin America. There are men who will read this to whom the missionary idea had never oc­curred before and there are others who have thought of it again and again, but who have evaded the missionary obli­gation. They say they never had "a missionary call." They do not plead that excuse when the nation asks them for their lives. Why should they need a different kind or degree or measure of call from Christ than they have had from the nation? There are men who, with­out a quiver, went across the sea and took whatever came, but who have been avoiding the missionary obligation, which does not ask them for any more. Why for the one and not for the other? "We thus judge"—we read the words of Paul, "We thus judge that One died for all, therefore all died; and He died for all, that they that live should no longer live unto themselves, but unto Him who for their sakes died and rose again."

For four years the world has poured out life and wealth without limit. It was a struggle which ought never to have been. But once precipitated there was but one thing to do and that was for an outraged world to go through with it at whatever cost and to spare nothing until the calamity was removed and the liberties of the world were secured. And now the struggle is past. Shall the sacrifices made for war be discontinued or shall we be ready to do for peace and for the coming of the Kingdom of righteousness all that we did for war and for the prevention of what we believed to be the threatened destruction of the freedom of mankind? Were not those sacrifices rational only as we now com­plete and perfect them in their perpetual consecration to the establishment of the reign of Christ in human life?