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4. Has foreign mission work actually kept back the progress of the Christian church at home?

5. Does the foreign missionary propaganda call for a larger expense in money and men than the church at home can well afford?

6. How soon is the so-called obstacle of the needs at home likely to be removed?

7. Can the heathen living to-day in need of the gospel and entitled to its blessings, justly be asked to withhold their appeal until conditions at home have been thoroughly righted?

8. Would the same argument, logically pursued, compel Christian churches to suspend all efforts for the depressed and needy classes in Christian lands, until these churches had attained their full development and their members had all grown Christ-like?

9. What has been the program of Christianity's advance thus far, including the practise of Jesus and his apostles?

In this connection we pass along to our pastors the words of Mr. William Jennings Bryan, which appeared in the Omaha Bee, October 28, 1906. Mr. Bryan says:

"This is a familiar objection, but as a rule it is urged by those who do the least for home missions. I think I am far within the truth when I say that the most liberal contributors to foreign missions are also the most liberal contributors to home missions, and that those who are so afraid that work at home will be sacrificed for work abroad are the very ones who themselves make few sacrifices for the work at home. The same spirit which leads one to be generous in the support of those benevolences which are immediately about him, leads him to take an interest in the needy wherever they are found. The same spirit which makes one anxious to have the Sermon on the Mount known in his neighborhood, leads him to desire that the knowledge of this sermon and the philosophy which it contains shall be brought to the people of all the world."

HORSE-SENSE IN FOREIGN MISSIONS

BY BISHOP WILLIAM LAWRENCE, OF MASSACHUSETTS

"WHY do not business men use the same psychology in missionary business that they do in their offices?

"Now and again a horse-sensed, hard-headed business man tells us in his office that he has no use for foreign missions: there is plenty to do at home. 'Why,' he goes on, 'two thirds of the people of this city are not Christians. There is a lot of wickedness, atheism, and degradation right here around us. We have got to concentrate our Christian work right here and clean up this city before we begin on Tokio and Hankow. Why should we be sending out strong young men to preach the gospel to Japaneşe and Chinese when there is so much for them to do at home?'

"How does he think out the same kind of a proposition in his own business? Perhaps he is the manufacturer of a breakfast food. According to his advertisements his food is essential to the health of everybody, so he sets up a factory and an office in his city and gets to work. Singularly enough, before a quarter of the people of his city have begun to eat his breakfast food, just as soon as he can raise the capital, he has planted a halfdozen agencies in other cities and before those cities have more than begun to nibble his breakfast food he has thrown his advance offices over to Chicago, and two or three years later his fellow-citizens traveling in Tokio find the breakfast food advertised there, and in Hankow, too.

"Suppose we turn on him and say, 'Why are you sending good breakfast food and young men to advertise and sell it all over the world before half the people in your own city have begun to eat it?'

"His answer is, 'I can't wait for the people in my city to catch up. If the breakfast food is good for them, it is good for the Japanese and Chinese, so why shouldn't I send it over to them? Are you going to confine my benefactions to my own town?'

"Now, as for capital, the work of the gospel is inexhaustible. So long as the spirit of Christ gets into young men there is

business to be done. Why shouldn't the hard-headed, horsesensed business man carry the business of the gospel to Tokio and Hankow in the same businesslike way that he carries his breakfast food? If the apostles had waited for every man inside the walls of Jerusalem to be converted before they struck off for other cities, the hard-headed business man in this country would never have heard the name of Christ."

A GREAT DEAL TO DO AT HOME AND A
GREAT MANY PEOPLE TO DO IT

BY DR. ARTHUR J. BROWN

"A NEW YORK pastor says that he 'never could understand why we think so much more of a heathen abroad than at home,' and he intimates that we ought to give less for foreign missions and more for the conversion of 'the foreigners within the shade of our churches,'—a sentiment which was editorially endorsed by several newspapers. If, however, he had looked into the report of the Charity Organization Society of New York, he would have found a list of 3,330 religious and philanthropic agencies in his own city. 'If these churches and their auxiliary buildings were placed side by side, they would reach in one unbroken frontage of long-meter godliness from the Battery to Yonkers, twenty miles.' The first time I visited New York's slum district, I was amazed by the number of missions. A high authority declares that 'there is no other city in the world, except London, where more is being done to point the lost to the Son of God than in New York.'

"Everybody has seen the statement that St. Louis has one church for 2,800 of population, Chicago, one for 2,081, Boston, one for 1,600 and Minneapolis, one for 1,054. In the United States as a whole, there are said to be 187,800 churches, or one for every 400 people, one Protestant minister for 700, one Christian worker for forty-eight, and one communicant for five. Talk about the relative needs of the United States! In a typical town of 8,000 people, there are three Presbyterian churches, three United Presbyterian, three Methodist, two Episcopalian,

and one Christian church. For every missionary the church sends abroad, she holds seventy-six at home.' A million Americans are engaged in distinctively religious work, about 150,000 of whom devote themselves to it as a separate profession. In the light of these facts, the statement that 'the church cannot see the misery which is under her own nose at home' appears rather absurd.

"How is it abroad? It is said that in Siam there is only one ordained missionary for 300,000 people, in India and Africa, one for 250,000, in China, one for 270,000, and in South America, one for 300,000. Dr. Arthur Mitchell wrote of a journey of only twenty-four hours from Hangchow to Shanghai: 'I was absolutely awestruck and dumb as I steamed past city after city, great and populous, one of which was a walled city of 300,000 souls, without one missionary of any Christian denomination whatever, and without so much as a native Christian helper or teacher of any kind. That silent moonlight night, as I passed unnoticed by those long, dark battlements shutting in their pagan multitudes, was one of the most solemn of my life; and the hours of daylight, when other cities, still larger than many of our American capitals, were continually coming into view, and the teeming populations of the canals and rivers and villages and fields and roads were before my eyes, kept adding to the burden of the night.'"

VI.

THOMAS E. WATSON'S
VITUPERATIONS

A FEW years ago Mr. Thomas E. Watson, a well-known figure in the South, published a series of articles in Watson's Magazine from his own pen, under the title "Foreign Missions Exposed." These articles have been brought together in a pamphlet which has been circulated widely in different parts of the country and which has caused not a little anxiety on the

part of friends of foreign missions who were unable to answer this subtle and unprincipled attack.

Fortunately, Mr. Watson's strictures for the most part are so violent and abusive as to carry their own refutation. As one reads the pamphlet, he finds himself alternating between indignation over the maliciousness of the charges and amusement over their absurdity. For instance, take these statements.

1. In view of present intellectual conditions in the United States, to engage in educational work abroad is "NOTHING LESS THAN CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY.”

2. "We are not Christianizing the Chinese and Hindus. We are simply bribing them to act the hypocrite."

3. "Medical missions are an instrumentality for making hypocrites."

4. "John Wanamaker and the other leading contributors to foreign missions are all hypocrites."

5. "The amount of money thrown away on the elaborate banquet which the Laymen's Missionary Movement provided for itself at the Hotel Astor, in New York City, must have consumed thousands of dollars. Those Pharisees, hypocrites, and unnatural egoists sat there under blazing lights hour after hour, stuffing and guzzling and smoking, consuming the costliest food, the costliest wines, and the costliest cigars, while a few blocks off cold and starvation were beating down their victims."

MR. WATSON'S INCONSISTENCY

WHEN any intelligent person has read a few pages into Mr. Watson's pamphlet, he realizes that he is dealing with a document which is rambling, illogical, insincere, untruthful, vituperative. In one place Mr. Watson says, "I heartily favor foreign missions," and he piously quotes much Scripture. In another place he affirms that the "beautiful, refining, inspiring code" of pagan morality produces fruits as good as those of Christianity. He charges the Roman Catholic Church with "threatening the very foundations of our institutions"; with "striking at the

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