Militant Methodism ; the story of the first National convention of Methodist men, held at Indianapolis, Indiana, October twenty-eight to thirty-one, nineteen hundred and thirteen ...

Front matter

The Story of the First National Convention of Methodist Men

HELD AT INDIANAPOLIS, INDIANA, OCTOBER TWENTY-EIGHT TO THIRTY-ONE, NINETEEN HUNDRED AND THIRTEEN

METHODIST MENl

Table of Contents

i.

OPPORTUNITY AND TASK.

The Central Task of the Church of Christ.

II. The Forces And The Field— A Survey

I. OUR DENOMINATIONAL SITUATION.

The Drift of the Church.

W. B. Hollingshead, Apportionment Secretary Methodist Episcopal

Church, Philadelphia 54

The Size and Complexity of the Organization to be moved.

S. Earl Taylor, Corresponding Secretary Board of Foreign Missions, Methodist Episcopal Church 61

The Proposed Remedy.

J. B. Trimble, Assistant Secretary Board of Foreign Missions 71

Leadership in the New Financial Plan.

John Lowe Fort, Superintendent Saratoga District, Troy Conference. 77

TABLE OF CONTENTS.

Meeting the Needs of the Hour.

U. G. Leazenby, Superintendent of the Crawfordsville District, Northwest Indiana Conference 81

Dillon Bbonson, Superintendent of the Boston District, New England Conference 83

Frank C. Evans, Crawfordsville, Ind 86

Robt. E. Jones, Editor Southwestern Christian Advocate 87

S. R. Smith, Freeport, N. Y. . . ., 88

O. F. Hypes, Springfield, Ohio 90

John T. Stone, Baltimore, Md 91

Alex. Bennett, Pastor Methodist Episcopal Church, Celina, Kans . . 98

Thomas Lippy, Seattle, Wash 94

W. F. Whelan, Buffalo, N. Y 96

D. D. Forsyth, Superintendent Denver District, Denver Conference. 97

II. WHAT OTHER DENOMINATIONS HAVE DONE.

The Southern Presbytebian Chubch.

C. A. Rowland, Secretary Laymen's Missionary Movement, Southern Presbyterian Church 90

The Disciples of Chbist.

A. E. Cory, Secretary Foreign Board, Disciples of Christ 104

The United Presbyterian Church.

J. Campbell White, Secretary Interdenominational Laymen's Missionary Movement Ill

The United Bbethben Church.

Bishop Howard 118

S. S. Hough 121

III. SECTIONAL AND EPISCOPAL AREA CONFER-

ENCES.

Episcopal Area Conferences 12a

Sectional Conferences 12$

TABLE OF CONTENTS.

III

FORWARD, MARCH! A CALL TO ADVANCE.

I. THE CALL OF OUR LEADERS.

To Advance in Bible Circulation.

W. I. Haven, Secretary of the American Bible Society 129

To Advance in Temperance.

Clarence True Wilson, Secretary Church Temperance Society .... 134

To Advance in Sunday Schools.

Edgar Blake, Corresponding Secretary The Board of Sunday Schools. 187

To Advance in Education.

Thomas Nicholson, Corresponding Secretary Board of Education. . 141

To Advance in Freedmen's Aid.

P. J. Maveety, Corresponding Secretary Freedmen's Aid Society . . . 149

To Advance in Home Missions and Church Extension.

Ward Platt, C. M. Boswell, Corresponding Secretaries Board of

Home Missions and Church Extension 155, 158

To Advance in Foreign Missions.

W. F. Oldham, Corresponding Secretary Board of Foreign Missions . . 161

II. THE CALL OF SOCIETY AND STATE.

American Cities and the City of God.

Wm. F. Anderson, Bishop Methodist Episcopal Church 169

The Call to Civic Righteousness.

A. W. Leonard, Pastor Methodist Episcopal Church, Seattle 175

The Call to Social Service.

F. J. McConnell, Bishop Methodist Episcopal Church 182

III. THE CALL OF AMERICA AND OF THE WORLD.

New Americans for a New America.

E. H. Hughes, Bishop Methodist Episcopal Church 190

The Challenge of an Awakened Word.

H. C. Stuntz, Bishop Methodist Episcopal Church 199

The Call to World Conquest.

J. Campbell White, of Interdenominational Laymen's Missionary Movement 206

TABLE OF CONTENTS.

IV. Actualizing The Program

I. A WORKING PROGRAM OUTLINED.

Message to the Church 222

A Working Program 225

II. METHODS FOR ACTUALIZING THE PROGRAM.

The Laymen's Missionary Movement.

Frank A. Horne, Brooklyn, N. Y 229

The Methodist Book Concern.

H. C. Jennings, General Publishing Agent 232

The Methodist Federation for Social Service.

Harry F. Ward, Secretary Methodist Federation for Social Service. 238

The Commission on Evangelism.

J. O. Randall, Secretary Commission on Evangelism 241

The Epworth League.

W. F. Sheridan, Corresponding Secretary Epworth League 243

Our Brother in Black.

I. Garland Penn, Corresponding Secretary Freedmen's Aid Society. 245 The Methodist Brotherhood.

W. S. Bovard, Secretary Methodist Brotherhood 247

The One Fixed Purpose in the Life of the Church.

W. E. Doughty, Educational Secretary Interdenominational Laymen's Missionary Movement 249

III. THE NEW DAY AND THE PROGRAM.

The New Day and Social Reform.

Herbert Welch, President Ohio Wesleyan University 256

The New Day and Christian Citizenship.

Ira E. Robinson, West Virginia 262

The New Day in Evangelism.

L. J. Birney, Dean Boston School of Theology 269

IV. THE LAYMEN AND THE PROGRAM.

What Would You be Worth If You Lost Your Money?

George Innes, Associate Secretary United Presbyterian Board of

Missions 277

The Layman's Witness to a Supernatural Gospel.

Fred B. Smith, Secretary International Committee, Young Men's

Christian Association 286

TABLE OF CONTENTS.

V. The Larger Outlook

I. FOR EDUCATION, LITERATURE, AND BENEVO- LENCE.

Fob Education.

W. H. Crawford, President Allegheny College 297

For Christian Literature.

David G. Downey, Book Editor for the Methodist Episcopal Church. 304

Our Retired Ministers.

J. B. Hingeley, Corresponding Secretary Board of Conference Claimants 311

Marvin Campbell, Treasurer Board of Conference Claimants 315

For Deaconess Work.

D. W. Howell, Corresponding Secretary of the General Deaconess

Board 319

The Church at Large.

W. O. Shepard, Bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church 324

II. FOR WORLD CONQUEST.

A United Church, A Conquering Church.

George P. Eckman, Editor The Christian Advocate 330

The Ownership and Lordship of Jesus Christ.

George Sherwood Eddy, Foreign Secretary International Committee, Young Men's Christian Association 338

III. FOR THE OCCIDENT AND THE ORIENT.

The American Republic A World Influence.

Wm. A. Quayle, Bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church 346

The Chinese Republic and Its Future.

George Sherwood Eddy, Foreign Secretary International Committee, Young Men's Christian Association 354

IV. CLOSING WORDS.

Wm. F. Anderson, Bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church 364

TABLE OF CONTENTS.

VI. Special Features

Organizing the Convention 369

The Convention Program 370

The Monument Meeting 374

The Convention Music 374

Carrying the Convention to the Church 375

Special Committees 375

Special Resolutions and Invitations 376

Church and Press 379

Concerning Delegates 879

U

Introduction

If there should go forth a call for three thousand Methodist men to serve the Church for an entire month as legislators and electors in General Conference, with all expenses paid, the ready response of fifty thousand volunteers would not be nearly so remarkable and hopeful a fact as was the coming together at Indianapolis of two thousand five hundred busy Methodist men from all sections of the country, and at their own expense, to consider the living problems now confronting the Church, to pray for a clearer vision of duty, and plan for the larger sacrifices demanded by the vision. Besides Bishop Moore, all the effective bishops in the country were present — the largest number ever in attendance at any gathering except at General Conference or at their own semi-annual meetings. District Superintendents were there from almost every Conference from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Pastors and laymen counted into the thousands — men who see and read and feel and act — not seeking more burdens, but larger results through more effective methods. These leaders of the Church, ranging in age from twenty-five to seventy-five, remained four days in sessions aggregating over eight hours daily. In compact masses they sat, filling the floor and platform and galleries of the large hall, listening with intense religious concern to the messages which followed each other in rapid succession. Nearly every speaker was a specialist in the part assigned him. Leaders of other Churches, men known the world over,

INTRODUCTION.

were heard with generous appreciation, and our own men were at their best. Systematically, consecutively, cumulatively, the affairs of the Kingdom at home and abroad were canvassed, problems measured, needs arrayed, and resources marshaled. Again and again conviction found voice in prayer and faith broke forth in song. Vision succeeded vision, fact was piled upon fact, appeal added to appeal, yet there was neither surfeit of speech nor loss of inspiring effect. God's power was upon the assembly. There these men sat and sang and prayed until they at last exulted in the very vastness of the task that challenged their faith in the leadership of Christ and the almightiness of God. No general interest was neglected.

When it came to the discussion of methods and means, the Financial Plan adopted by the last General Conference was heartily approved. The unifying of the appeal for the several great Boards, a persistent informational and inspirational campaign, both by literature and co-operative field work, the every-member canvass, the use of the duplex envelope for weekly or monthly payments to insure regular and systematic giving, the standard, "as much for others as for ourselves," as the common measure of our stewardship as Christians; the protection of our congregations against indiscriminate and unauthorized appeals — these were the great features of the plan commended.

To aid the benevolent Boards to put this plan before all our Churches in an effective way, the sum of sixty thousand dollars was pledged by those present. This fund should be at once increased to $300,000 for the next two years.

China and India are ready for our Lord noiv. The planting and watering of many years have made ready such a harvest time as the Church has never seen and can never see

INTRODUCTION.

again. The conditions in our own country are perilous in their portent unless we multiply our evangelistic agencies everywhere. Every one of our benevolent Boards has its place among the forces that must be active if the Republic is to live and fulfill its mission.

This book is the great Convention in print. It is therefore awakening, arousing, energizing, informing, persuading, convincing, inspiring. For every live pastor and layman its facts and visions will flame into quick action. For the listless and inert, who prefer ease to service, we must trust to the fuses lighted by the Spirit of God at Indianapolis. May they burn until they reach all the stored and latent dynamite of Methodism !

District Superintendents, pastors, and lay speakers will here find just the material for effective team-work in their own district and local areas.

May the spirit of the great Indianapolis meeting of Methodist men spread throughout the entire Church !

Earl Cranston.

PART I. Opportunity and Task

Wtyt ^orlu HBrorijerfjooa.

THERE was ever a wistfulness in Jesus* voice. The sense of the unrealized often fairly ached through His words. A wistful look was in His

eyes, a wistful mood was in His tears, a wistful cadence gave His words the rainy sweetness of tears and laughter intermingled. The how things were to be was on Him, not in a lowering way, like a threatening storm. Nothing Carlyleian was with Him. He did not practice high invective as an end. His swish of cords upon the vulgar shoulders of the sellers in the temple was not His custom and never His delight. His custom was compassion. He was not ominous, despairing, for His prophecy swung golden bells in a blue sky and rung them as a holy, hymnic chime.

Christ was wistful; for a world He dwelt among races of provincials. The Jew, the Greek, the Roman were all provincials. Their provinces differed in girth a little, only a little. Christ whispered, trumpeted, wept, sung, preached, lived, died — all framing a wide, unprovincial word — The World. "Unto the uttermost parts of the earth," was the summons and the direction. We have been learning at it a long time, yet have we not learned it. The size has bulked too vast. It has taken the breath clean out of us. The lash of a storm-wave of the sea which leaves the swimmer drenched, breathless, bleeding, and prone like seaweed on the shore is not more fierce in its effects than this majestic word of Jesus — "The World!"

Yet breathless as we have been, we shall soon stumble to our feet. In a brief hundred years earth has learned earth, world has perceived world beyond what it had known in all its lifetime. That is provocative of hope. We are coming on. "Who is my neighbor?" "Nobody much," was the contemporaneous reply. "Everybody mostly," is our contemporaneous reply. We are learning, blessed be God! We are provincials, but are slowly acquiring the world-speech. The vocabulary of a planet shall by and by express the thought that blazes within the soul.

A World Brotherhood! How majestical and tidal! It rises like the beat of drums that challenge to a fray. We fought men long, too long. We shall now answer the summons of the drums to fight for men.

These Methodist men from many wheres have prayed together, laughed together, wept together, dreamed together, challenged together, learned the world-mood together. We have been conscious of the whirling, tremendous planet. We have felt it swim beneath our feet like the rush of flying angels.

The World Brotherhood! The black, the yellow, the brown, the red, the white, equal the world — equal what Christ died for. Hallelujah and amen.

"God hath made of one blood all kindreds of the earth," was a proclamation of incalculable breadth and wonder, but could not get on. The consanguinity of blood seems to lack dynamic. That doctrine made no specific headway. It stood inert, or nearly so. But the world brotherhood, by the shedding of the blood of Christ, has made headway, and will make headway. Christ, God-Man, blood of our blood, and the mingled blood of man and God, and that blood spilled for the world, has produced world brotherhood. "This is My Blood of the New Testament, shed for you and for many" — that many being all, has availed. The prevailing blood was what the Christ sacrifice proved to be.

And thus has the World Brotherhood passed from an aerial phantasy to a terrestrial actuality, permanency, beneficence. Brothers, let us clasp hands. Brother men, let us exalt the name of the Lord Christ together. Brother Men, let us unite in prayer.

William A. Quatle.

Opportunity and Task.

The larger vision of the life in Christ was experienced in the opening minutes of the National Convention of Methodist Men, for the home of the Hon. Charles Warren Fairbanks, who as general chairman of the Local Committee was to have opened the Convention, was a house of bereavement. Almost on the eve of this great gathering of men, whose coming he had anticipated with earnest desire, the beloved comrade through the years of his labors as citizen, statesman, and Churchman, passed to the commendation of Him in whose service she had spent her life. Dr. Joshua Stansfield, the pastor of Mr. and Mrs. Fairbanks, speaking a word of welcome to the Convention in place of Mr. Fairbanks, said : "In the decease of Sister Fairbanks the home, the Church, the State, the Nation, aye, the Methodism of the round world, mourns the departure of one of the noblest daughters of the Church and one of the most loyal, gracious, and serviceful of women, a truly elect lady. But while we sorrow, we sorrow not as those who have no hope, for we have laid away her precious body in sure and certain hope that the dead in Christ shall live again, and we are confident that so noble, strong and good a soul has gone forward and upward to a yet larger life and service. ' '

Bishop David H. Moore, who as co-chairman with Mr. Fairbanks of the Local Committee, opened the Convention, declared in announcing the death of Mrs. Fairbanks, that she was to her husband ' ' the companion of his life, the sharer of all his joys and sorrows, his steadfast friend and counselor, a woman who illustrated all the beauties of the domestic relations, of social and public life, and particularly of the Christian life." He was also compelled to announce the death of Dr. Robert Forbes, corresponding secretary of the Board of Home Missions and Church Extension — "a man who has been in the forefront of the battle to bring this country under the dominion of our Lord Jesus Christ. ' '

It was, therefore, with a new and sharpened sense that the King's business demanded efficiency and haste, that the

MILITANT METHODISM.

delegates, their hearts tender and warm with Christian sympathy and love, listened and watched as the foundations for the work of the Convention were laid by such master builders as Speer, McDowell, and Nuelsen. For no mean study was to be made. Methodism early took the world for her parish, albeit, scarcely realizing what its content would be in the many-sided life of the nations of to-day. It was both essential and fitting that the central task of the Church of Christ be faced squarely at the start in order that it might be discovered whether Methodism's mission and message are attune to the heart-cry of the world-folk. "With a full appreciation of the central task and an interpretation of Methodism's mission and message into its universal demand, the achievements of our Church take on new meaning, and the larger opportunities set before her become privileges of service for all her children.

The Central Task of the Church of Christ.

Robert E. Speer.

When the future student of the history of the Christian Church and of the higher life of man looks back upon our time, it is interesting to conjecture what his judgment will be as to what was its really greatest movement on life. Will he select popular education, with its emancipation of the mind of man from superstition, its new sense of human values and possibilities? Will he select the great scientific advancement of our day and its influence upon our common life, or its bearing upon our thoughts of God and of the world ? Will he select the changing emphasis which our day has seen from the individual to society as a whole? Will he pick out some one of the theological movements of the time involving changed emphasis in men's thinking? I do not believe he will select any one of these, but a movement greater than any one of these, affecting and including all of these. I believe he will select the courage and the success of the rediscovery and the reaffirmation of the missionary principle ; that, looking back over the century and a quarter that

OPPORTUNITY AND TASK.

lie behind us, and the seventy-five years, perhaps, that lie just in advance of us, he will select as the deepest and most characteristic movement of this time Christianity's readjustment of its mission and the reassertion by Christian men of their obligation to carry the sovereignty of the gospel over all the world and into all the life of men; It may be that some will answer that in no small measure, at least, this is not a movement peculiarly of our day; that this is only the central characteristic of what we speak of as the Protestant Reformation. But the Reformation was really a geographically provincial movement. It influenced the people of only one continent, and of only part of that continent. It never faced the great issues of comparative religion. It knew nothing of great areas of human life that lay beyond the territories in which the influence of the Reformation was felt. And even within those territories it did not deal with all the life of men. Even the dawn of the nineteenth century had left the common man outside the real, penetrating purposes of the Christian gospel. It is clear, with no exaggeration of the movement in which our own lives are cast, that the future student, looking back upon our day, will pick out that great movement illustrated in the Church, that great movement of the rediscovery and reconstruction of Christianity in missionary times as the great movement of the world's life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

I spoke of the courage of that rediscovery and reaffirmation. It is an easy thing for us gathered here to-day to take a world vision and dare to front all the life of our own time with the name of Christ and say, "Over you Christ shall be Sovereign, King." Looking back a century and a quarter, we realize what a bold and daring thing it was for the men of that time, who for the first time saw the glorious missionary character of our Christian faith, that, with resources or without them, in the name of their new vision they came out of the old to help the world into the new. I speak not alone of the courage of the rediscovery of the missionary prin-

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ciples, but its success as well. A success that has now eaten itself into the whole moral conscience of the world, so that everywhere men and nations are doing their thinking to-day because they do their breathing in the atmosphere of Christian faith. And, looking ahead in imagination, that student whom we have in mind will judge all the activities of men by the relationship which they bore to this movement, by the clearness and the daring in which they dealt with the great problems confronting the Church of our time. Those problems are shifting under our eyes. When we speak of the central task of the Christian Church we say what John Wesley and Charles Wesley and John Rollins and William Sutcliffe said a century and a quarter ago, but in another sense we must say an entirely different thing. I have been working for a quarter of a century in connection with this missionary enterprise, and I have seen the problems shift at least five times in that period, so that men to-day who are to grapple with the Church's central task must look out on the world with different eyes from what men looked out with twenty-five years ago.

For one thing, we have had driven in upon us, as no other decade ever had, the problem of putting a new spirit in the whole relationship of the world, of turning this world neighborhood that has been created into a great relationship of brotherly men. Now, that the neighborhood has been created, there is no gainsaying. We might as well come out of our insular provincialism and face our problems. God has given us one compacted life to live in. Three years ago I rode up the west coast of South America with a Peruvian gentleman who had just then been appointed prefect of the city of Equitos, far up the head- waters of the Amazon. It was only a few miles from the capital city of Lima. The route he was taking took him two weeks' journey, from Callao to Panama. Another week's journey from Panama to New York City; another week's journey from New York City to Liverpool, and four weeks' journey from Liverpool back across the Atlantic

OPPORTUNITY AND TASK.

and up the Amazon. That was the shortest route. We used to say that the whole world was larger than any of its parts, but when you have to travel to Europe, going twice across the Atlantic Ocean, to reach a point that would be but a short journey across land in Peru, it would seem that the whole world is smaller than most of its parts to-day. We are facing a geographically contracted world which compels every man to touch elbows with every other man, and we are beginning to realize that there is but a single industrial community in which we have to do our work. Four years ago I spent the winter in Scotland, a great part of it in Aberdeen, which is the center of the greatest meat market in Great Britain ; they said it would always be their own, but, walking along the main street, I saw a new shop and in glittering letters ''The River Platte Meat Company." I went down to the city of Dundee, where the jute mills were lying idle, and when I asked the reason they gave me the answer in the terms of the crops in the Philippine Islands. A friend of mine came from China a few months since, and in one of the Eastern cities told about a cargo of iron that had been made in the blast furnaces of the city of Hankow, and they brought that iron around the world and sold it in the harbor of New York. When he got through, a gentleman came up and said, "I bought that iron, and I paid all the duty that was levied in New York upon it, and took it to Buffalo and paid the duty charged by Canada, and I sold it at a profit in Toronto." Whether we like it or not, the fingers of God are closing in upon us and making us one industrial community and making out of us one common family with a single intellectual life. I was in South America during the Arctic episode of a few years ago, and I found that the chief topic of conversation in South America, even away on the top of the Andes Mountains, was that same subject current all over the world. There died this last month in the city of Tokio the nestor of Congregational missions in Japan, Daniel Crosby Green, one of the really great men of our

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day, because he saw that there is not any longer an insulated people ; that all that is stirring in the local life are the things that are stirring through all the life of mankind. We have to face the fact and construct the work of the Christian Church in the light of a single compacted world. It is a terrible thing to deal with conditions like these unless all your neighbors are your brothers. If a man is not to be the friend of another man, the wider the distance separating them, the better; if he and the other man are to live with no fence or a low fence between them, woe be to them if they can not live there like brother-men ! We face a new world, a world in which Christianity has not to deal with any isolated people, but with all mankind at once, and we have to penetrate that human neighborhood with the spirit of brotherly good-will. In the second place, we have to face to-day the new problem of directing and controlling the great tides of life which are astir for the first time across the world. There is no gentleman here who can not remember when the standard books on the life of the great East were the books of Mr. George Curzon and Mr. Meredith Townsend, every one of whom was preaching twenty-five years ago the doctrine of the perpetual isolation of Asia, that one half of humanity was isolated from the other half by a chasm that could never be bridged, that a fiat of arrest had fallen upon the yellow races so that they were inaccessible to any new principles of life from without, and that we had to accept the situation that the world was split in twain; but we have lived to see the utter stupidity of such views, and we are called upon now to direct a great, swelling tide of educational interest such as was never in the world before. You know the problem that we have in the United States of keeping our secular education from destroying us; here you have to toil to undergird it with morals and religious sanctions; but how are you to do where the Christian tradition does not permeate the whole life of the land? I ask you to think what that problem is among the eight hundred millions of Asia, where that Chris-

OPPORTUNITY AND TASK.

tian atmosphere is not to be found, where the old religious sanctions have decayed, where our modern secular education is operating upon the lives of eight hundred million people who can not supplement it in their own homes with the saving principles of sound ethics. We face to-day the great problem of moralizing the education of one-half of humanity- We have to deal with the great industrial current that is beginning to sweep across the world. The Argentine Republic to-day exports every year about twenty times as much as China exports, leaving out of account their relative population. China exports to-day about one hundred and eighty-eight million dollars' worth of goods; if she exported as much per capita as the Argentine Republic to-day, and she is far richer — she has mineral resources of which Argentina can not dream — she would not be exporting one hundred and eighty-eight millions, but twenty-seven thousand millions of dollars every year ! We stand to confront the most tremendous industrial avalanche that ever broke loose upon mankind, and we have to f raternalize that great human power. Then, there is the great tide of nationalistic feeling that is making a new world out of our world, differing radically from that in which our fathers lived. Great Britain subdued India with not more than two hundred thousand white soldiers, and has kept India in a species of serfdom, and the question is asked, How were they able to hold two hundred and ninety-eight millions of people? And the answer is, Because there was no such thing as an Indian nation, but only a great chaos of diverse races. Why was it that people after people, whom China in the day of her power would shake off as a strong man, were able to humiliate China in the days gone by ? Because there was no Chinese nation. But now a spirit of nationalism is arising in those Eastern lands. How are you going to humanize this nationalism? We must bring to bear upon it a universal religion with universal brotherhood, with a spirit of universal relation ; and every one of the non-Christian religions has denied that brotherhood. We have seen

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turned loose in the world to-day great energies that make a man stand still and gasp unless there is somewhere in the world a hand that can be laid upon them and say to them, "I am your Lord."

In the next place, we face the problem of reinforcing and re-empowering our home Christianity so it will not be a refutation of our whole-world proclamation of the gospel, so that it will penetrate human life and all human relations, and one looking behind him to the land from which he came will not see a denial of his doctrine. I have talked with groups of students on this subject, who have raised the argument of our failure to have our Christianity regnant in the social and moral life of our land. Among our problems that we have to solve is that of the organization of the Christian Church so that we can go to the people on the other side of the world and say, "This is the Christian Church; it will apply anywhere." How do you explain the turned keys in the doors of the country churches? How do you explain the numbers of Churches at home that stand impotent before their tasks as though they were planted across the sea? How do we know that we have the Christianity and the terms and forms that really fit the lives of the Asiatic peoples until we have found how they fit perfectly the lives of our own Western peoples? Here are the problems, industrial, ethical, educational, social, moral— the great questions of our own day. One of the great problems of our day is the problem of so releasing in our own land those energies of the Christian faith in which we believe that they will make out of the very character of our Nation an unanswerable proclamation of Christ to all the world of men.