earth. The words "Go ye" surely mean that He intended every one of His disciples to have some part in the effort to make the gospel known to all men, either by personally going or by giving towards the support of those who do go. The obligation is squarely and heavily laid upon the conscience of every Christian. This majestic enterprise is therefore of divine authority. When a young clergyman asked the Duke of Wellington whether he did not deem it useless to attempt to convert India, the great general sternly replied: "What are your marching orders, sir?"

We may well be awed by the majesty of Christ's declaration. A lonely Nazarene, surrounded by a handful of humble followers, calmly bidding them carry His teaching to the most distant nations. They were not to confine their efforts to their own country. "Every creature" must be reached. We are to begin with the man on our right hand and belt the globe until we come back to the man on our left hand. No exceptions are to be made. Christ did not say: "Teach all nations save those that you deem beneath you"; nor did He say: "Preach to every creature, except the Hindu and Buddhist and Mohammedan, who have religions of their own." made the scope of His command absolutely universal.

He

It is the purpose of God, said Paul, "to reconcile all things unto Himself." We should never lose sight of the grandeur of this conception. Christianity is not a life-boat sent out to a sinking ship to rescue a few passengers and let the rest go to the bottom. It will save all the passengers, unless they refuse to be saved, and it will save the ship. The Bible looks to a redeemed earth. Let us hope and pray and work for nothing short of that stupendous consummation. Limiting the grace of God, doubting its adequacy for all men, acting as if it were for America and not for Africa and the islands of the sea, are sins against the Holy Ghost.

These are and ever must remain the primary motives of the missionary enterprise. There are others, however, of a second

ary character, which are influential with many people and which may be briefly enumerated :

(a) The Philanthropic Motive.-This is stirred by the consciousness of human brotherhood and the natural desire to relieve the appalling suffering and ignorance which prevail throughout the heathen world. Christ is the Great Physician now as of old. As we see the prevalence of disease and misery, the untended ulcers, the sightless eyes to which the surgeon's skill could bring light, the pain-racked limbs pierced with red-hot needles to kill the alleged demon that causes the suffering, and the fevered bodies that are made ten times worse by the superstitious and bungling methods of treatment, our sympathies are profoundly moved and we freely give and labour that such agony may be alleviated. Medical missions with their hospitals and dispensaries strongly appeal to this motive, as do also the educational missions with their teaching of the principles of better living. The gospel itself is sometimes preached and supported from this motive, for it is plain that the sufferings of men are diminished and the dignity and the worth of life increased by the application of the principles of Christianity to human society.

(b) The Intellectual Motive.-Missionaries have vastly increased the world's store of useful knowledge. They have opened vaguely known lands. They have probably done more than any other class of men to extend a knowledge of the earth's surface and its inhabitants. Geography and ethnology, entomology and zoology, botany and kindred sciences gratefully enroll the names of missionaries among their most successful explorers, and many thoughtful men appreciate this and give their sympathy to the cause which the missionaries represent.

(c) The Commercial Motive.-The missionary is the representative of a higher civilization. His teaching and his manner of living incidentally, but none the less really, create wants and introduce goods. He lights his house with a lamp, and

straightway thousands of the natives become dissatisfied with a bit of rag burning in a dish of vegetable oil. So foreign lamps are being used by millions of Chinese, Japanese, and Siamese and East Indians. The missionary marks time with a clock, and German, English and American firms suddenly find a new and apparently limitless market for their products. He rides a bicycle on his country tours, and the result is that today the bicycle is as common in the cities and many of the villages of Siam and Japan as it is in the United States. His wife makes her own and her children's dresses on a sewingmachine, and ten thousand curious Chinese, Japanese, and Laos are not satisfied till they have sewing-machines. And so the missionary opens new markets and extends trade. He has been one of the most effective agents of modern commerce, not because he intended to be, not because he reaped any personal profit from the goods that he introduced, but because of the inevitable tendencies that were set in motion by the residence of an enlightened family among unenlightened people. And this appeals to some minds as a motive of missionary interest. It begets hundreds of addresses on the reflex influence of foreign missions and it undoubtedly secures some support for the cause from those who might not be responsive to the other arguments.

(d) The Civilizing Motive.-This is closely allied to the preceding motives. In the ways that have been indicated and in others that might be specified, the missionary is "the advance agent of civilization." As the product of centuries of Christian civilization with all its customs and ideals, he appears in a rude village in Africa. He opposes slavery, polygamy, cannibalism and infanticide. He teaches the boys to be honest, sober and thrifty; the girls to be pure, intelligent and industrious. He induces the natives to cover their nakedness, to build houses and to till the soil. He inculcates and exemplifies the social and civic virtues. His own home and his treatment of his wife and daughters are object lessons in a

community which had always treated woman as a slave. The inertia of long-established heathenism is hard to overcome, but slowly it yields to the new power and the beginning of civilized society gradually appears. Volumes might be filled with the testimonies of statesmen, travellers, military and naval officers to the value of missionary work from this viewpoint. Ask almost any public man to speak at a missionary meeting, and he will probably respond with an address in which he enlarges upon this aspect of missionary effort. The British officials in India have been outspoken in their praise of the civilizing influence of missionaries in that country. Darwin's testimony to the usefulness of missionary work in the South Seas is a classic illustration and hundreds of others might be cited. Dr. James S. Dennis has collected a vast mass of facts bearing on this subject in his noble volumes on "Christian Missions and Social Progress" and the cumulative power of this class of evidence is doubtless a large factor in the growing respect for missions in the public mind.

(e) The Historical Motive.-With many people of the utilitarian type, the argument from results is the most decisive. They want to see that their money accomplishes something, to know that their investment is yielding some tangible return. They eagerly scan missionary reports to ascertain how many converts have been made, how many pupils are being taught, how many patients are being treated. To tell them of successes achieved is the surest method of inducing them to increase their gifts. Mission boards often find it difficult to sustain interest in apparently unproductive fields, but comparatively easy to arouse enthusiasm for fields in which converts are quickly made. The churches are eager and even impatient for results. Fortunately, in many lands results have been achieved on such a scale as to satisfy this demand. But in other lands not less important, weary years have had to be spent in preparing the soil and sowing the seed, and hardworking missionaries have been half disheartened by the in

sistent popular demand for accounts of baptisms before the harvest time has fairly come.

There is, apparently, a growing disposition to exalt this whole class of motives. The basis of the missionary appeal has noticeably changed within the last generation. Our humanitarian, commercial and practical age is more impressed by the physical and temporal, the actual and the utilitarian. The idea of saving men for the present world appeals more strongly than the idea of saving them for the next world, and missionary sermons and addresses give large emphasis to these motives. We need not and should not undervalue them. They are real. It is legitimate and Christian to seek the temporal welfare of our fellow men, to alleviate their distresses, to exalt woman and to purify society. It is, moreover, true and to the credit of the missionary enterprise that it widens the area of the world's useful knowledge, introduces the conveniences and necessities of Christian civilization, and promotes wealth and power, while it is certainly reasonable that those who toil should desire to see some results from their labour and be encouraged and incited to renewed diligence by the inspiring record of achievements.

But these motives are nevertheless distinctly secondary. They are effects of the missionary enterprise rather than causes of it, and the true Christian would still be obliged to give and pray and work for the evangelization of the world even if not one of these motives existed. Moreover with the wider diffusion of knowledge, some of these considerations are becoming relatively less important. Men who are not Christians at all can, and as a matter-of-fact do, travel and study in non-Christian lands. Trade, as we have seen elsewhere,1 disseminates vices as well as virtues. Japan, India and the Philippines have educational systems which give excellent secular training. As for civilization, some non-Christian lands

"New Forces in Old China," pp. 124sq.