highly-favoured in mental training and social accomplishment in these days find no more power to save in knowledge and judgment than did the ancient Greeks, how can we ask the world to come to the same cisterns for the water of life, to broken cisterns that can hold no water? I have said and I repeat that knowledge and judgment do not make our nature perfect, but do not misunderstand me so as to think I say that our nature can be made perfect without these things. The most skilfully constructed steam-engine, with the best fuel and water all in their places and in perfect order, is absolutely powerless without fire; but the engine and the coal and the water are not therefore useless. Even so the treasures of knowledge and the charms of judgment do not exalt and perfect the soul without the divine fire of charity, but when these treasures and faculties are utilized and vitalized by love, then we have the perfection for which we were created and redeemed. But this New Testament ideal of culture is not always the ideal of Christians. How often do we hear it said of the adherents of a certain Church that "their ignorance is the mother of their devotion," and yet in that Church are many of the most learned men in the world, whilst in all the Churches are found some good men who, in their fear of a proud mind and stubborn will, give up to others the task of forming their opinions and guiding their actions. How are such men better than those which in the old time mutilated their bodies for fear they might be tempted to sinful excess? The good and faithful servant whom our Lord commends, was the one who used the talents given to him and made them more, but it was the wicked and slothful servant who hid his Lord's money in the earth for indolence and fear. There is again an opposite extreme of one-sided development of the spiritual nature. An undue emphasis is placed on the reason and the will. Correct thinking and orderly living are made the be-all and end-all. Hence what is sometimes called a "cold rationalism," and hence also a "dead orthodoxy" and a dry formalism." Not that rationalism must be cold, or orthodoxy dead, or formalism dry, but that if we have not the mind of Christ in our thinking and the heart of Christ in our living, we are none of His. Though we have all knowledge and all faith and have not charity, we are nothing. Did time permit, it would be pleasing to review the remarkable declarations of our Lord and His apostles on this subject. Let me mention some of them very briefly. In the famous thirteenth of first Corinthians, we have the supreme and eternal excellence of charity set forth. In Romans xiii. is the same teaching that "Love is the fulfilling of the law," and in the thirteenth of Hebrews, at the head of all the admonitions is this, "Let brotherly love continue." To all the world, Roman and Greek, Jew and Gentile, the Master of all proclaims, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment, And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets." Once more, there is the word of the disciple whom Jesus loved, and who lingered as His last witness upon the earth: Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and everyone that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love." Love, therefore, is the dominant, the essential, the vital principle of the religion of the Gospel. With this root-principle, even the ignorant and the rude have the life of Christ, and they will grow up into Him in all things and be conformed to His likeness, but without this germ of life, all else must perish and be cast out. This is the general truth of the New Testament, but the particular teaching of the text is that the larger the life, and powers, and resources dominated by the principle of love, the nobler is the spiritual development, and the more full of blessing to the world. It is very true that a man may be in good health without his limbs, and that he may have hands and feet and yet be helpless from weakness or disease; but true physical well-being is not realized in either of these cases, but only in the man whose body is at once sound and perfect. In like manner, a man may be a true Christian, notwithstanding gross ignorance and rudeness, while he may have no true spiritual life though learned and refined. Yet the ideal of spiritual wellbeing is not realized in either of these cases, but rather in the man whose possibilities of knowledge and culture are developed, and whose love abounds more and more, consecrating body, soul and spirit to the glory of God his Saviour and the good of his brother man. Such a spiritual manhood as this has not only a heart, but also hands and feet. This is the original idea of Christian culture. I have no new ideal for you. Eighteen centuries have passed since St. Paul set forth this ideal in his prayer for the people whom he seems to have loved the most. The times have changed since then, but human nature is the same; its need is the same, and in our own day and all along the ages it has been proved that in the apprehension of the grace of God in Christ Jesus our Lord, there is the same power to lift men from their lowest degradation, and to exalt their highest accomplishments and attainments, and change them as the water into the wine. This is the ideal of life I would present to you on this occasion, so full of interest in our college life; this is the prayer that will follow you from your Alma Mater and from all who love you best. It would not give us pleasure to know that you had, each one of you, a giant's strength, if we thought you would use it like a giant. It would not give us pleasure to know that you had, each one of you, an inheritance of millions, if we feared you would use it in selfishness and self-indulgence, to oppress the poor and pamper your own lusts. And we would have but small satisfaction in thinking of the knowledge and culture you have gained in your student years, were it not for the good hope that you will use your superior advantages in the superior service of mankind and to the greater glory of the God of love. The world was never in greater need than it is to-day of the help that only men who are at once wise, and strong, and loving, can give. The age seems to be on the verge of dissolution or of regeneration; the old heavens and the old earth seem about to pass away. If this should be in strife and blood, it will be because love will not abound. But whether it be by revolution or by evolution, that changes come and the old heavens and old earth pass away, be it yours by every good word and work to help in the new heavens and the new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness. Men who have had your advantages are needed to protect the sanctities of the Home, to further the enterprises of the Church, to preserve the order of Society, and to ensure the safety of the State. Wisdom as well as love is needed. When a child is smitten with disease, it taxes all the love of the parent and all the skill of the physician to bring about the restoration. Much more in the service of the Church, and of Society, and of the State do we need the skill and wisdom, as well as the most generous devotion. Take with you, therefore, this ideal of Christian culture, and then whilst your opportunities have been great, and your responsibilities are great— great, too, will be your work and your reward. HITHERTO. BY ANNIE CLARKE. FOR the way Thy love has led us, we give thanks and sing And ofttimes we toiled with crosses that were hard to bear, Up the steep and stony mountain, to its utmost height, Shine and shadow, calm and storm, with changing loss or gain, For the way Thy love has led us, we give thanks and sing HEATHEN CLAIMS AND CHRISTIAN DUTY.* IT is not as a mission worker in even the humblest department of mission work that I have been asked to speak to-night, but as a traveller, and as one who has been made a convert to missions, not by missionary successes, but by seeing in four and a half years of Asiatic travelling the desperate needs of the un-Christianized world. There was a time when I was altogether indifferent to missions, and would have avoided a mission station rather than have visited it. But the awful, pressing claims of the un-Christianized nations which I have seen have taught me that the work of their conversion to Christ is one to which one would gladly give influence and whatever else God has given one. In the few words that I shall address to you to-night, I should like, (for I cannot tell you anything new or anything that you do not already know) just to pass on some of the ideas which have suggested themselves to my own mind in my long and solitary travels, and perhaps especially since I came home, full of the needs of the heathen world, and to some extent amazed at the apathy and callousness of the Christian Church at home. I have visited the Polynesian Islands, Japan, Southern China, the Malay Peninsula, Ceylon, Northern India, Cashmere, Western Thibet, and Central Asia, Persia, Arabia, and Asia Minor. In each of these countries I have avoided, as much as possible, European settlements, and have scarcely lingered so long as I could have wished at mission stations. My object was to live among the people, and I have lived much in their own houses and among their tents, always with a trustworthy interpreter, sharing their lives as much as possible, and to some extent winning their confidence by means of a inedicine-chest which I carried. Wherever I have been I have seen sin and sorrow and shame. I cannot tell of the fields whitening unto harvest, nor have I heard the songs of rejoicing labourers bringing the sheaves home. But I have seen work done, the the seed sown in tears by labourers sent out by you, honest work which has made me more and more earnestly desire to help the cause of missions from a personal knowledge of the work in the mission fields, but not among the lower races, or the fetich worshippers, or among the simpler systems which destroy men's souls. The reason, perhaps, why I have seen so little missionary success is because the countries in which I have travelled are the regions of great, elaborate, philosophical religious systems, such as Buddhism, Hinduism and Mohammedanism. Naturally, among those at home there is a disposition to look at the work done. On my part there may be too great a disposition, possibly, to look at the work left undone, because it seems to me so vast and so appalling. The enthusiasm of Exeter Hall has in it something that to many is delightful and contagious. We sing hopeful, triumphant hymns; we hear of what the Lord has done, of encouragements which a merciful God gives to inadequate and feeble efforts, and some of us perhaps think that little remains to be accomplished, and that the kingdoms of this world are about to become "the kingdoms of our God and of His Christ." But such is not the case, and I think that we may, instead of congratulating ourselves upon the work done, though thankful for what God has enabled us to do, bow our heads in shame that we have done so little and served so little. And I would like to-night that we should turn away from those enchantments, for enchantments they truly are, and set our faces towards the wilderness, we are •From an address delivered in Exeter Hall, London, by Mrs. Isabella Bird Bishop, F.R.G.S., and Honorary Fellow of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society. an The work is only beginning, and we have barely touched the fringe of it. The natural increase in population in the heathen world is outstripping at this moment all our efforts; and if it is true, and I believe it has never been contradicted, that four millions only have been baptized within this century, it has also been said without contradiction that the natural increase of the heathen world in that time has been two hundred millions, awful contemplation for us to-night. It is said that there are eight hundred millions on our earth to whom the name of Jesus Christ is unknown, and that ten hundred and thirty millions are not in any sense Christianized. Of these, thirtyfive millions pass annually in one ghastly, reproachful, mournful procession into Christless graves. They are dying so very fast! In China alone, taking the lowest computation of the population which has been given, it is estimated that fourteen hundred die every hour, and that in this one day thirty-three thousand Chinese have passed beyond our reach. And if this meeting were to agree to send a missionary tomorrow to China, before he could reach the Chinese shores one and a half millions of souls would have passed from this world into eternity. Nineteen centuries have passed away, and only one-third of the population of our earth is even nominally Christian. In some countries I have hardly ever been in a woman's house or near a woman's tent without being asked for drugs with which to disfigure the favourite wife, to take away her life, or take away the life of the favourite wife's infant son. This request has been made of me nearly two hundred times. This is only an indication of the daily life of whose miseries we think so little, and which is a natural product of the systems that we ought to have subverted long ago. There are no sanctities of home; nothing to tell of righteousness, temperance, or judgment to come, only a fearful looking for, in the future, of fiery indignation from some quarter, they know not what ; a dread of everlasting rebirths into forms of obnoxious reptiles insects, or of tortures which are infinite and which are depicted in pictures of fiendish ingenuity. or And then one comes to what sickness is to them. If one speaks of the sins, one is bound to speak of the sorrows too. The sorrows of heathenism impressed me, sorrows which humanitarianism, as well as Christianity, should lead us to roll away. Sickness means to us tenderness all about us, the hushed footfall in the house, everything sacrificed for the sick person, no worry or evil allowed to enter into the sick-room, kindness of neighbours who, maybe, have been strangers to us, the skill of doctors ready to alleviate every symptomall these are about sick beds, together with loving relations and skilful nurses; and if any of us are too poor to be nursed at home there are magnificent hospitals where everything that skill and money can do is provided for the poorest among us. And, besides, there are the Christian ministries of friends and ministers, the reading of the Word of God, the repetition of hymns full of hope-all that can make a sick-bed a time of peace and blessing enters our own sick-room, and even where the sufferer has been impenitent, He "who is able to save to the very uttermost," stands by the sick-bed ready even in the dying hour to cleanse and receive the parting soul. But what does sickness mean to millions of our fellow-creatures in heathen lands? Throughout the East sickness is believed to be the work of demons. The woe and sickness in the un-Christianized world are beyond telling, and I would ask my sisters here to remember that these woes press most heavily upon women. This is only a glimpse of the sorrows of the heathen world. May we seek to realize in our own days |