Now here is disinterested testimony, put not half as strongly as the facts warrant. The any other place is Africa; and if these hapless creatures do not name Africa in the utterance of their tearful longings, it is because thousands do not dream that there is any possibility of ever getting to this distant country. I found during my travels in the South, in 1882, that hundreds were turning their faces to Arkansas and Texas, who had never heard of Liberia or of the American Colonization Society.

Now ought not the church, in contemplating the magnitude of the work in Africa, to consider whether this superfluous energy might not be utilized? Here at least is the physical basis of a great moral and spiritual superstructure. Do not go about lamenting your incapacity to help Africa when you have with you the elements of effective assistance, but which on account of its apparent insignificance you despise. Remember Longfellow's baffled and disheartened artist:

Then a voice cried, "Rise, O Master;
From the burning brand of oak
Shape the thought that stirs within thee!"
And the startled artist woke,-

Woke, and from the smoking embers

Seized and quenched the glowing wood;
And therefrom he carved an image,
And he saw that it was good.

O thou sculptor, painter, poet!
Take this lesson to thy heart:
That is best which lieth nearest;

Shape from that thy work of art.

Do not wait until you have trained the Negroes up to your ideal-in your peculiar modes of thinking. You cannot make them Anglo-Saxons. You never will make them so in spirit and possibilities if I interpret the providence of God aright. The Hebrews in Egypt remained illiterate and ignorant, though surrounded for four hundred years by the splendors of a brilliant civilization. That civilization was not for them, though they had by providential direction been brought into contact with it. It was not suited to the peculiar work for which they were destined. So the children of Africa among you have in them the possibilities of a great work in the fatherland. Remove them from the pressure in your

country to the freedom and congeniality of their ancestral home, and so open a wider sphere for the play and development of their social, moral and spiritual nature. It is not the best plan to rely upon college training to fit them for work in Africa.

The fugitive Hebrew slaves, without the learning of the schools, received the law for their guidance-found the truth for their race in the solitudes of the desert. In Africa the merest rudiments of western learning will have more power upon the Negro than the highest culture in America. There is something in the atmosphere, in the sunshine, the clouds, the rain, the flowers, the music of the birds, that makes the a b c of your culture more valuable to him than all the metaphysics and philosophy you can possibly give him in America.

In contrasting the results of the methods of his Mohammedan teachers upon the Negro with those produced upon him by the efforts of his Christian guides and instructors, one is reminded of the old story of Falconnet, a vain French artist, who was once lecturing a class of students on the horse of Marcus Aurelius. For a time he was critical and captious, pointing out little faults of detail and contrasting them with a more perfect anatomical model of his own. But at last the spirit of the artist overcame professional jealousy, and he exclaimed, "After all, gentlemen, that ugly horse lives, and mine is dead." Something of the same feeling comes over the thoughtful observer as he studies the results of the two religious systems upon the African. The Christian Negro, equipped with all the apparatus of the schools, appears at a disadvantage by the side of his Mohammedan brother. The training of the latter is admitted to be faulty and imperfect, but he is at home in Africa and dominant in the land of his fathers. After all, the ugly horse is alive.

If Christians in America will trust to the healing and restorative power of nature, and will help the thousands to migrate to Africa, and then, under the influence of the earth and sky and sea of the ancestral home, will further assist them with elementary schools

and plain gospel preaching, and with tools for mechanical and agricultural work, Africa will soon lift up her head.

The methods generally pursued, apart from the principle of the Liberian enterprise, will never cause Christianity to penetrate the interior with any hope of bringing the tribes under its sway. Of another thing I am not much less assured, that Mohammedanism unless Liberia is strengthened and stimulated by an increase of civilized population and schools-will extend its influence to the sea along the whole of Upper Guinea and will control the indigenous tribes. This it will do with the countenance and support of European governments dependent for their revenues upon a trade largely under the control of the sober and energetic Moslems. At Senegal a splendid mosque erected by the government is lavishly supported from the public treasury. And yet the Mohammedans strenuously resist the military enterprises of the French in the interior.

The

The religion of Arabia has the advantage of numbers in its work in Africa. religion of America may also have this advantage, if the church there will get near enough to the unsophisticated Negro to understand his broken utterances about Africa. Dr. Ellinwood told the Assembly at Omaha that "the Mohammedan college in the little African state of Tripoli, with one thousand students, sends to the interior not less than three hundred missionaries every year; and the great Azar in Cairo, with ten thousand students, sends to the Moslem mission fields not less than two thousand a year."

The Nigritian Mohammedans are wonderful propagandists. Half scholars, half merchants, they are devoted to trade, literature and religion; they are also pilgrims and adventurers. You will find them in every important city on the coast; and in the interior they haunt the busy centres of trade and lead in all the places of popular devotion. They have in their favor certain elements of truth-enough to make them grow and thrive. The Koran appears to the cursory and superficial reader self-contradictory, dull-"a tissue of incoherent rhapsodies;"

but it is impregnated with a few grand ideas, which stand out strongly from the whole. On the St. Paul's river one frequently sees huge trees standing on high banks overhanging the stream, with just enough root in the soil to hold them, but growing in all the luxuriance of the trees in the fertile valley or on the rich mountain side. These river-side trees are a picture of Islam. It is a mighty tree standing on apparently very little soil, but soil enough to hold it. Every rising tide seems to threaten its downfall, but the water recedes; freshets come and go, and leave it more firmly rooted in the earth than before. It is a power to be reckoned with, then, in all attempts to evangelize Africa; and no isolated missionary effort can resist the organized force it brings.

Bishop Taylor has recognized this important fact, and he is endeavoring to demonstrate the feasibility and necessity of colonies for the greater and ultimate success of mission work in Africa. He has recently wisely adopted Liberia as a base and strategic point for his operations, where, protected in his rear by a regular government in sympathy with his work, he will not be subject to the intrusion of so many conflicting influences to which he is exposed in the Congo country.

Shall Liberia, for the want of a generous and far-sighted sympathy, be compelled to linger in the unhealthy regions of the coast, circumscribed in the field of her operations and paralyzed by physical and moral malaria, while thousands of possible agents of an effective work, within and beyond her borders, wander uselessly about your country, asking, "Who will show us any good?"

In the great speech of Dr. Ellinwood before the Assembly, so full of the philosophy and the results and the hopes of foreign missions, not one word is said of the work in Africa or of the future of this continent. Perhaps she is so near America in the millions of her representatives there that she is regarded as a part of the home mission field. Then deal with her as a part of your household, and remember the apostolic estimate of the man who fails to provide for his own household.

This mighty problem is not so much a question of organized method as of spirit and of individual work, hand to hand, face to face, man upon man, soul with soul.

We live in a day of labor-saving inventions, and we cannot see any good reason why they should not be introduced into the kingdom of heaven. The great religious demand of the times seems to be for some machinery that will move the people to church and make converts of them, and do it very fast and with a minimum of hand work. We want a spiritual incubator that will hatch a thousand eggs at a time, and do away with the scratching and feeding and hovering of the mother bird. We want to have spiritual children without the pain of travail, and the cost and care and selfsacrifice of bringing them up. How different was Paul! "My little children, of whom I travail in birth again until Christ be formed in you."

The truth is, as some one has truly said, that no evangelistic methods which can be devised can be essentially new. Nothing can take the place of personal contact—of the touch of soul upon soul. The work is spiritual, the required force is spiritual, and we recognize no spiritual force that is not personal. These "masses," of which we speak in such a vague and general way, are made up of individuals, each one a unit, separate and complete in himself. Every individual of these "masses" has his own life, his own world. He has his home, his work, his habits, his thoughts, his friends. He has become well used to his world, and he is absorbed in it and is as well satisfied with it, probably, as you are with yours. He knows nothing, cares nothing, about your world, your life-even though they be the new and beautiful world, the holy and happy life your precious faith has given you. He will not exchange his world at anybody's beck and nod. In order to accomplish your purpose you must first induce him to take a look at your world. Then you must persuade him that it is better than his. You must create by degrees a new

mental and spiritual atmosphere for him. You must replace one object after another of his old outlook with new ones from yours, until it is a new heaven and a new earth that he sees.

All this takes time and labor and personal contact. I am not forgetting the part of the Holy Spirit in the work. I am not forgetting conversion. But we all know that, whether conversion comes sooner or later in a man's experience, it is in this gradual way and through contact with living Christians that Christ is formed in the heart.

We might as well make up our minds to it first as last, that for the converting of men to God there is no substitute for downright hard work with individual men and women. All Christian history is with us on this point. Our Lord's public discourses must have produced a profound impression on the multitudes that heard them, and doubtless bore much fruit in holier and nobler living; but they do not appear to have won him many life-and-death followers. When he wanted men whom he could build into the foundation of his spiritual temple, he chose a little company, and kept them with him, night and day, for three years, until by long personal contact they absorbed somewhat of his spirit. And in his general ministration he seems to have depended quite as much upon the personal as the public method of teaching, as it was his habit to seek men out, mingling freely with them wherever they congregated. With the continent of Europe to conquer for his Master, Paul began by speaking to a little company of women he found one Sabbath afternoon, down by the river side, near Philippi, and in one of them, Lydia, the seller of Tyrian purple, he won his first European convert. In the apostolic history we read of but one repetition of the scenes of Pentecost of but two occasions when men were converted en masse. No student of the New Testament can fail to see that the real basis of the work of the early church was personal, friendly, social, domestic. The public preaching of the word was used as the

The

necessary pecuniary aid. Successful evangelists-among whom I think I am justified in including Mr. Moody-look with growing disfavor upon any evangelistic movements not firmly centred in a church or a closely-compacted company of churches. Workers on a smaller scale, who have been maintaining independent missions in tents and halls, and gospel temperance workers, have reached the same conclusion. most serious question now confronting the McAll Mission in Paris is what to do with its converts, as the French Protestant Church does not seem to furnish them a congenial spiritual atmosphere. We cannot improve upon the family as an institution for the rearing of children and for the highest development of the whole nature of man. It is God's institution for these ends. No more can we improve upon the local church as an institution for the rescue of sinning men and women. It is God's institution for this purpose. The mission chapel is not a church. It has not the ordinances nor the government of a church. As at present constituted, its attendants are kept in an anomalous, humiliating and injurious position. Their names are made to swell the roll of the parent church, and their children's names the rolls of its Sunday-school. Four or six times a year they are expected to come up to the grand church and participate in the communion, and for the rest of the year the expectation is equally confident that they will attend at the chapel. Do these great churches need to be convinced that if the people they have gathered into their chapels were organized into a church, their missionary made a pastor, a governing body chosen from among the membership, and if the needed financial help were continued, and a few of the active men of the parent church, with their families, should cast in their lot with the new enterprise, there would be an immense gain of spiritual power? There is many a great city church whose figures in the year-book of its de

nomination would suffer a mortifying decrease if the statistics from its chapels were separately printed.

Missions should be kept merely as outposts, as recruiting stations, from which the converts and adherents should be worked as rapidly as possible into the sustaining church. They should be kept small. Their services should be distinctively evangelistic, and not attempt should be made to provide for the needs of a congregation of stated worshippers. When the church becomes full, let a colony go out, to make room in the old home and to set up a new one in some desert place

sustained largely, almost wholly, for a time, it may be, by gifts from the mother church and guided by its friendly oversight

but organized as a church of the Lord Jesus Christ, and so helped and taught as to become self-sustaining as soon as may be, and to become in its turn a mother of churches.

City missions, tract societies, Bible societies, gospel temperance unions, breakfast associations, services in tents and theatres and halls, Christian charitable associations, open-air missions, are all good, valuable, necessary adjuncts. But they will be successful just in proportion as their connection with local churches is made close and strong. The local church is the unit in God's militant host. The local church must bear the brunt of the battle.

There is a very plain inference from all this. It is that pastors or members of local churches have no need to stir from home in search of a starting-point for the work of city evangelization. We need wait for no new devices. Right where we stand, behold the old institutions, the old methods, the old church, the old Bible, the old "foolishness of preaching," the old prayers, the old sacraments, the old "fellowship of the saints,” and the Eternal Spirit, the blessed Son, the adorable Father, waiting to bless us. W. R. TAYLOR. FIRST REFORMED CHURCH, PHILADELPHIA.