and that means that greatly increased tides of our ablest men should be pouring into the Christian ministry. Every other profession is overcrowded. Not a man of you going into law or medicine or engineering can get a foothold for himself from which he does not crowd away a competing man. The only line of activity in all the world to-day of which I know that is competing for men, where men do not need to compete for place, is the kind of work that our Lord Himself did at the very beginning. There is need for great bodies of men to push right out to-day into the Christian ministry at home and abroad. I did not see this when I was where you are. When I went to college, I expected to study law. My father was a lawyer, my brother was a lawyer, my uncle was a lawyer. The family had no other idea for any of us except that, and I never thought for a moment of going into the Christian ministry. It was only when the ideals of the Student Volunteer Movement came to our college-and I can remember them and the day of their coming, as some others here to-night can, as the day of the dawning of a new life-that they turned me from all thought of the law to that of Christian service. If I were choosing to-day any line of activity in this country, knowing pretty well, too, where men of power and influence in our country are to be found, I would not hesitate one moment. There is no sphere on this continent to-day comparable in influence and power and lucrativeness of moral return with the place that is open to true men inside the Christian ministry. This is emphatically true regarding the mission field abroad. Its most clamant, insistent, far-reaching call is for men who will not need Saul's armor; for men who will go out unencumbered, with the same clear, unaccoutered message that Christ bore, that St. Paul bore after Him, to the great open mind and heart of the non-Christian world. This emphasis should dominate not only the men to whom I am speaking, still free to make their choice of life's calling. It should dominate every man and woman, no matter what our particular profession or calling may be. Those men who are going out to the mission field to engage in educational work should make evangelism the primary purpose and the dominant thing in their own lives. Alexander Duff did that in India, and his stamp is there to-day. Calvin Mateer did just that in China, and his mark remains still upon China. S. R. Brown and Guido Verbeck did it in Japan, and Japan may forget but never will lose their impress. The men who are going out into medical work have no right to relegate this evangelistic purpose to any secondary place. The missionary conscience requires of them that they shall be just as scrupulous and true in their oral statement of the Gospel of Christ and their living utterance of it as that they should do honest work in operatingroom or laboratory. I have seen Dr. John G. Kerr, one of the greatest medical missionaries of his time, a man who performed perhaps more operations than any other surgeon in the nineteenth century— I have seen him again and again, like a father among his children, while he spoke, as one who loved them, to the men and women and little children of the Saviour, whom he loved most of all. You know what was the rule in Dr. Mackenzie's hospital in Tientsin, where the clinic had to be finished by noon, all dressings attended to, and the hospital cleaned for the day. Then he and every attendant spent the whole afternoon going about from cot to cot to the Chinese who had placed themselves under his care, telling of the Great Physician and His healing power in the soul. In any line of our activity we are untrue to the Watchword, we are untrue to our mission, we are untrue to our Lord, if we do not lay emphasis where He laid it in His own life and in His own work. This emphasis is necessary if the motive is to be found by which our task is to be done. I wish there were time to take you back across the years to some of the utterances of Rufus Anderson, the most acute and courageous student of missionary policy that this country has produced, where he shows that it is this evangelistic motive alone that will carry men out to a real life-work, that will hold them there against all discouragements and limitations, so that they will not go home if the conditions are not all pleasing, that no other motive will lead them out in the volunteer spirit that flung Isaiah down before the lifted Lord in the temple in the year King Uzziah died, but the holy motive that lies at the deepest roots of the human soul, a motive found in evangelistic passion for the Christ who would save the whole world of men. No other emphasis than this will bring us the adequate motive, none other secure the longed-for result. The great trouble with the world is not intellectual ignorance; is not environment; it is simply unredeemed personal wills, and nothing will ever cut home to the roots of all the world's appalling need but the power that penetrates to the depths of life and relates men in the springs of their being to God, the fountain and foundation of all truth and holiness and strength. And if our ideal is the evangelization of the world, and we believe, as we do, that that can be accomplished only by establishing in all these lands great native Churches that will make Christ known to their own people, will you tell me how you can produce an evangelistic native Church under the influence of institutionalized foreign missions? Your native Church is going to be not what you tell it to be, but what it sees that you are; and the only way whereby we can ever penetrate and pervade these great national Churches, which are growing up with a spirit that will make them as burning and shining lights throughout all the darkness of these alien lands, is by setting before them, as St. Paul set before the early Church, as our Lord set before the twelve in the school in which He trained them, first things in first places. Finally, it is this emphasis alone that will give to you and to me our power. We must get beyond our trust in buildings, in appropriations, in equipment, in all material resources. The finite things are obviously necessary, but so long as our confidence is in these finite things alone our strength will be merely finite strength. We must strip ourselves from all such reliances and be content to go out with Christ and His pure Gospel as our one message, our one burden, our one reliance. And when the hour comes that we have brought ourselves to that dependence, there will come, as there came nineteen hundred years ago, the sound as of the rushing of a mighty wind, and weak men will rise in a new strength, timid men will find themselves facing the world with a new courage, and the morning of the world's redemption will have broken at last. Would that here to-night, on this first day of the new year, Christ might be able to find among us men and women of this heart, men and women to whom Christ Himself is the only reality, to whom Christ is all in all, who have only one passion-Him, only Him. Surely, if before we go we will be still and listen for Him, we may hear Him calling for such hearts: I hear the voice Of one who calleth, Calleth sweet and clear, For men to reap for Him A harvest white. Oh, soul of mine, rise up and answer Him The long night falleth, And the day be gone, thy day be gone. |