will last one generation and no more; that the only world with which we have anything directly to do, that the only world with which we are confronted, and which confronts us and asks an accounting from us, is the world of our own generation. I am not forgetting our organic responsibility to posterity, but the only discharge of that responsibility is the doing of present duty. And the Church very soon came to see this, too. The one great note of our missionary enterprise for the last ten years, the note made possible by this courageous emphasis of the Student Volunteer Movement from the beginning, has been the note of immediacy. All of us who gathered three years ago at that great council in Edinburgh felt the pressure of it there. Men were no longer ready to sit down under the deliberate principle of the postponement of missionary duty. They came to realize that our task lay at once to great multitudes of men who would hear the Gospel never if they did not hear it at our lips, whose right to it is as good as ours and whose need is as mortal.

Another great change which these years have brought with them, which has made emphasis upon this last phrase comparatively easy for us, lies in this fact-that the last twenty-five years have seen mankind breaking through the mysteries of vast new secrets of power. Great energies of which our fathers never knew are now laid in our hands and placed beneath our mastery. A new world of power and possibility has been opened to us, a horizonless world. The bounds of freedom have been pushed further and further outward; and just as men realize that they dare not place any limit upon the power God is ready to put in the hands of men who are prepared to use physical power as a trust, just so no man dare set any limit upon the power that God is ready to lay in the hands of those who are ready to use spiritual power also as a trust. We are beginning to believe now that our Lord was a man of honor when He said: "Whatsoever ye ask in faith believing, ye shall receive," and that the word He spoke was sincere and honest when He declared: "If ye have faith, nothing shall be impossible unto you." Under the conviction that we dare postpone no duty, under the conviction that no task is beyond the strength of men who serve God, we do not shrink any longer from the uttermost implication of those words: "The evangelization of the world in this generation."

And, my friends, every feature of the world-situation that you and I confront to-day is a summons to lay new emphasis on that phrase. This present generation that we are facing is a generation bowed down under mortal need. Ask these friends of ours from the great Chinese Republic across the Western sea to tell you of their need. Ask the men who have come across the other sea, from that dark continent to the southeast, to tell you of their need. We have heard to-night of the great and

appalling needs of those fifty millions of our Southern neighbors who lie closest to us of all the calling nations of the earth. My friends, it is no answer to the mortal need of these men to tell them that long after their bones have moldered to dust, by some slow process of racial education the light of the Gospel shall have glimmered down to their far-distant children. The attitude of those who can thus mock the living, mortal need of the generation of our day with gravestones instead of bread, is not the attitude of Him who loved the world and laid down His life for its soul.

This present generation is not a generation in the clutch of deep mortal need alone. It is a generation of plastic flow. Other great ideas will surely penetrate the minds of all mankind in this generation. Twenty-five years from now not a village on the face of the earth will be as it is to-day; not a human life will be conditioned as it is to-day. Do we intend to sit idly by and allow other great ideas to pierce to the life of the world while the idea of Christ, which we know to be the most piercing and pervasive of all ideas, is postponed to be administered to a preempted world by generations that come after ours?

This present generation is not only a generation of deep mortal need, and a generation of plastic flow; it is also a generation in which that plastic flow is fast setting in its molds-molds that will last for our day and the day that comes after our day. Was Lowell right when he said, "Once to every man or nation comes the moment-and the choice goes by forever"?

Thus looking out upon the world that is calling to us, the world that is going on its road as we go ours, the world of plastic flow now hardening fast into forms that will not change, God forbid that we should abate one iota of the emphasis laid twenty-five years ago upon the necessity of the evangelization of the world, not in some other day than ours-that day will face its own duties— but the discharge of our duty in our lives, the evangelization of our generation in our own time!

Yes, and there is one stronger reason even than this for perpetuating and deepening that old emphasis. We need, and we never shall cease to need, the great moral and spiritual principles that were embodied in that idea. The man who desires to walk with God must walk with Him on the level of Godlike tasks. The man who would confront the Infinite must be willing to do so on the plane of the program of the Infinite, and not invite God to a humiliating complicity in puny undertakings. All life is of God, and all duty, even the humblest, is divine; but we need to-day, as the Church never needed in any day gone by, a challenge to supreme and supernatural enterprise and a commensurate faith. We are not engaged at our own charges in a warfare of our own. We did not conceive this enterprise. We are not carrying it out for any glory or ends of our

own. We have been set to a great task by One whose power has no limits fixed to it, who has charged us to do a thing that we can do because He has charged us to do it. If there be one need of our day greater than another, it is the need of which our friend Dr. Cairns wrote me in a letter last week, regarding the miracles of Water Street, the need "in the theological desert of a highway for our Lord, a recovery of the ancient faith," that would not mortify the living attribute of God's own power, but that would allow Him to show to men the fulness of His life and love, and the fountain of superhuman achievements open to man to-day.

I have said all this for the sake of avoiding any misunderstanding. Everything that we have ever said regarding the worldobligation of our faith, regarding the possibility of the duty of the evangelization of the world in this generation, we are ready now to reaffirm and to augment. But I believe with all my heart that the pressing need of our time is to lay emphasis in the Watchword on the thought of the words that heretofore we have been passing by, "the evangelization of the world." After all, that is the basic need. "The world," "this generation"-these are only the sphere in space and time in which the basic thing is to be done. Our great aim and end is to evangelize. What does that mean? Well, it is not an easy thing to say just what it means. Who can tell when any man has been evangelized? Who can tell when any nation has been evangelized? Who can tell when the world has been evangelized? No man of us here to-night knows when any man has heard. What I say, no two of you hear to-night as the same words. Some of you seem to hear it, and could repeat it, but you have not really heard it at all. Some of you have heard half of it; some of you have heard two thirds of it. What is it to hear? No man can say. What is it to be evangelized? We do not know; but we do know enough about our own primary part in evangelization. We know it is our part to take the living Christ, God's message and messenger, and what that living Christ said, and was, and did, not only the Gospel that was what Jesus Christ brought and taught, but the Gospel that could only be after Jesus Christ had finished His program, that lay deep-bedded in all He is and is doing now-to take that Gospel of Christ alive in us, and to lay that living Christ and His message upon the lives of men and upon the life of the world. The New Testament does not use the word "evangelize" in an exact sense. But what our Lord Himself and St. Paul did will illustrate, perhaps, what it is, and how vital and fundamental it is. In three short years Jesus went up and down. Judæa, Samaria, and Galilee, and I suppose He would have said that He had evangelized those villages. He so spoke to men. St. Paul tells us that from Jerusalem round about to Illyricum he had fully evangelized the Roman world. This, at least, may be said, that when we are speaking about the evangelization of the world, we

seem to be using the word in a larger and more exact meaning apparently than that in which it was used by those who first made use of the term in the New Testament Scriptures.

We can see from their methods also how vitally important it I was. Here was our Lord and Master with all the secrets of human influence. He might have moved up and down the world healing the sick, feeding the hungry, doing by miracle the great work He came to do. He did these things, but it is perfectly obvious that He did them not as ends but as means and illustrations. He was bent upon introducing a new order of personal and social life, of thought about God, of vital relationship. He made this central and dominant, and He went up and down speaking to men out of His own life the message that He had brought and that He was. He wrote never a word. After Him came another man who had a doctor with him, and we read of not one single healing miracle either of skill or of supernatural power wrought by Paul and Luke in all their missionary travels. Paul simply took this great living messagewith no support of institutional missions-he took his great living message and planted it far and wide across the Roman world. That was the beginning of the morning of the new day for humanity. What St. Paul and our Lord did, we must believe to be the first thing in our missionary activity still.

I do not say that they used all the missionary methods that are legitimate. It is right enough and necessary for us to produce our Christian literature, though our Lord wrote never a word. It is right enough and necessary for us to build our great hospitals, though St. Paul wrought almost never a miracle of healing. It is not only right, it is indispensable, to use education and philanthropy to represent the Gospel in ordinary life and in institutions. The board I serve has 1,721 schools and colleges, and 191 hospitals and dispensaries. It has asylums for lepers and the insane, schools for the blind and the deaf and dumb, printing-presses, homes for tuberculosis patients; and men and women are needed for these, and truly serve Christ in these; and rightly conducted these are not only agencies of evangelization, they are evangelization. Only they need to be bathed and engulfed in the most direct and persuasive teaching of Christ and His Gospel, and I remind you men and women who are looking forward, as many of you are, to spending the greater part of your lives in accessory activities, that these two, our Lord and St. Paul-whose lives were the most powerful lives that ever have been, that lie at the foundation of the Christian Church and of the modern world-chose for themselves the one pure, simple undertaking of carrying the living message straight into the living heart of persons. And the one great need of the missionary enterprise to-day is for men and women who will follow in their footsteps.

I brought with me here this evening some of the speeches made

at the Continuation Committee Conferences held throughout Asia by Mr. Mott during his visit there in 1913. Every national conference of the four that were held, and almost every one of the separate district conferences that were held, joined in saying just what was said at the All-China Conference at Shanghai: "Our Lord Jesus Christ has laid upon His Church as a primary duty the preaching of the Gospel to all nations. Times come in the history of nations when their need of the message of life becomes manifestly urgent. It is such a time in China now, and in God's providence there is an opportunity corresponding to the urgency of the need. A great door and effectual is open for the direct preaching of the Gospel. While fully recognizing the great evangelistic value of the educational, medical, and other institutional work, the conference considers it urgently important at the present time to provide for, and to safeguard the maintenance of, an adequate supply of workers, Chinese and foreign, for the organization and prosecution and extension of purely evangelistic work, and urges that a due proportion of funds be allocated for the effective equipment of this purpose." Those of us who gathered in the Japan and Korea Conference this afternoon will remember the reference there to the appeal that came from the Continuation Committee Conference in Japan for the doubling of the number of men engaged in direct evangelistic work, and for the largest possible measure of unification in all institutional work, in order that men might be released to give their whole time and strength to that to which our Lord and St. Paul gave theirs. I believe that the one supreme need in this Movement, in the missionary enterprise, and in the world today, is that we should recover the old ideal and emphasis and proportion of the early Christian Church and of the ministry of our Lord Himself.

This emphasis upon the evangelization of the world in this generation, I make bold to say-speaking to those here this evening who are responsible for determining the policy of our missionary organizations—should govern the proportion of our appropriations; it should govern the classes of workers that we send out to the field; it should more and more become a controlling principle in all the program and development of our missionary undertaking. And that it may become this, it is necessary that this same emphasis should guide men in their choice of their life work. Never in all my memory of the work of the board with which I am connectedand I have been associated with it now for more than twenty-two years has there been a time when it was as difficult as it seems to be this year to find men who will go out to do the primary missionary work, to do the thing that St. Paul and our Lord did in the beginning. Never was it so hard as it is to-day. It is necessary that this emphasis of which I am speaking should guide men in the choice of their life-calling if the needed messengers are to be found;