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 OR COMPANIONS OF 
 THE PRESENT CHRIST 
 
 &, Vision 
 
 BY 
 
 COURTENAY H. FENN 
 
 3& 
 
 PHILADELPHIA 
 
 {&&* Westminster press 
 
 1910 
 
 
Copyright, 1910, by 
 
 The Trustees of The Presbyterian Board of 
 Publication and Sabbath School Work 
 
 Published February, 1910 
 
OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 BY ROBERT E. SPEER 
 
 HOW earnestly we will put a case depends on 
 how earnestly we feel about it. If we have 
 no ardent and glowing love for Christ, and 
 no sense of the unique wonder of the treasure 
 which is in the gospel and is nowhere else, and 
 no yearning toward mankind, so satisfied with 
 what it has and yet so incomplete without Christ, 
 and no deep fear of the infinite loss of ail Christ- 
 lessness, we shall be able to look at the whole 
 missionary idea di^ a+ely ar' 1 to speak of it 
 with calmly modi ., ts 
 
 are aflame with 
 we hold Christ in any uni , 
 
 tion and believe the gospel, and the goppel aio , 
 to be the power of God unto salvation, and m^n 
 and nations to be lost men and nations, astray from 
 the true way and missing their goal and their life, 
 then we shall speak out with ardor and conviction, 
 and shall set the cause in some such place as it 
 held in the mind of Christ, and as it has always 
 held in the thought of God. 
 
 We may put our conviction in reasoned argu- 
 ment or in statement of fact, or we may, if we have 
 the imagination for it, put it in some such vivid 
 form as that in which Dr. Fenn has cast it in this 
 little book. When it is put in this last way, it may 
 
OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 be that the mood out of which the dream springs 
 is necessary to appreciate the dream. But the 
 truth and the appeal are there, whether appreciated 
 or not. And I think everyone who values the 
 saving of men as the Saviour valued it, and to 
 whom heroism and faith appeal, will be moved by 
 this vivid picture. If the appeal which it makes 
 has a tremor in it and moves with a thrill upon 
 our hearts, that is the merit of it. If we are 
 unresponsive to it, do we not need to look in upon 
 our own minds to see whether we have found or 
 have lost the mind that was in Christ, who being 
 in the form of God counted not equality with 
 God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, 
 taking the form of a servant, and becoming 
 obedient unto death, yea, the death of the cross? 
 This is the solemn question with which Dr. 
 Fenn's vivid and moving appeal confronts us. 
 
OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 FOREWORD 
 
 
 THE author is aware that this is by no means 
 the first " vision" of the visible presence of 
 Him who, though invisible, is yet as really 
 present in his church as though the eye of the 
 flesh could see his glorious, loving face, and the 
 ear of the flesh could hear that sweetest, truest 
 voice that ever man heard. He has read several 
 of these, and among them some which have stirred 
 the world. 
 
 The present story — if such it may be called — 
 is the outgrowth of a conviction, dating back 
 to his earliest ministry, and even to his student 
 life, that such recognition of the presence of 
 Christ in the daily life as is here described, such 
 " practice of the presence of God" in Christ, such 
 individual, personal incarnating of the promised 
 Holy Spirit, to reassure us that he is something 
 more than an effluence or an influence, is the only 
 thing that will put life into all the energies and 
 activities and enterprises of the church, making 
 them something more than societies and associa- 
 tions and movements, namely, powers for the 
 evangelization of the world and the establishment 
 of the kingdom of our God and of his Christ. 
 That is why the world has been stirred by such 
 ideal presentations of this truth: they have been 
 the revelation of an unrealized, unappropriated, 
 
4 
 
 OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 mighty force. The church has been slow in per- 
 forming its part under the great commission 
 because it has only imperfectly realized that 
 Jesus Christ meant what he said when he prom- 
 ised his disciples, "And lo, I am with you always, 
 even unto the end of the world." The difficulties 
 of the church vanish when that is realized; the 
 excuses of the church are silenced in the blush 
 of shame when that becomes the most real fact 
 in our possession; and all the work of the church 
 acquires a tenfold effectiveness when each man 
 asks himself, "What would Jesus do in my 
 place?" and does it. 
 
 Fifteen years of contact with the heathen world 
 convince one of the unspeakable need, of the 
 critical opportunity, and of the utter inadequacy 
 of present methods and means. But with each 
 missionary on the field, and each Christian at 
 home, a real companion of the present Christ, 
 the time would not be long in coming when "the 
 earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the 
 glory of Jehovah, as the waters cover the sea." 
 
 &on*siM^ZZ~t ^vo.'UT^ 
 
 Peking, China. 
 
OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 ^O 
 
 TO LIVE IS CHRIST" 
 
 To me to live is Christ; I died 
 
 With him who once was crucified. 
 
 The old I died; the new with him revived; 
 
 My life is now from him alone derived. 
 
 To me to live is Christ; his life 
 Has come to end the bitter strife 
 Of all the evil with the good in me, 
 And give me sure and perfect victory. 
 
 To me to live is Christ, not self: 
 
 The world, its pleasures, honors, pelf, 
 
 I count but very dross, their brightness dim 
 
 When once compared with my new view of him. 
 
 To me to live is Christ; my pride 
 Has shrunk and vanished, placed beside 
 That great Humility which brought him down 
 From heaven's glory to a thorny crown. 
 
 To me to live is Christ; that foe, 
 
 My old-time temper, source of woe 
 
 To me and mine, has given place to his; — 
 
 And meek and gentle Jesus' temper is. 
 
 To me to live is Christ; my will, 
 
 Unbroken, strong, determined still, 
 
 Is yet transfused with Christ, his loving voice 
 
 Become my arbiter of every choice. 
 
 To me to live is Christ; his peace, 
 Within my heart, has caused to cease 
 The fret and burden of the daily care; — 
 The cure for worry is the life of prayer. 
 
 
vrzrr 
 
 OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 
 To me to live is Christ; the pain, 
 Before so bitter, now is gain. 
 With him to suffer, with him bear the cross, 
 How great a joy in what I once called loss! 
 
 To me to live is Christ; his power 
 
 Is grace sufficient for each hour. 
 
 Whate'er the work, where'er the way may lie, 
 
 I cannot falter with the Master nigh. 
 
 To me to live is Christ; his love 
 Constraineth me, that I should move 
 To save the lost, to love the sinner vile, 
 Remembering that I too sinned erstwhile. 
 
 To me to live is Christ; O Death! 
 
 There is no sting now in thy breath. 
 
 Jesus has conquered Death, that last of foes; 
 
 Abounding Life forever with him rose. 
 
 To me to live is Christ; O Life 
 
 Of glory at the close of strife! 
 
 With Christ forever, bliss beyond compare! 
 
 'Tis gain to die, for Life beginneth there. 
 
 — C. H. F. 
 
 V. 
 
OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 Z3 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 IT was the Saturday before Foreign Mission 
 Sunday in the Westminster Presbyterian 
 Church of Jaconsett. The church still ad- 
 hered to the "good (?) old custom" of taking one 
 offering a year for the cause, and that toward the 
 end of April. It was not a deliberate attempt to 
 keep the Foreign Board on the anxious seat until 
 the end of the fiscal year, but simply a custom of 
 long standing. The church had been greatly 
 prospered, for Jaconsett was a growing city, and 
 its expansion had all been in the direction of 
 Westminster Church, which had now enrolled 
 a membership of eight hundred and twenty, the 
 additions for the year having been ninety-five, 
 seventy-six of them by letter from other churches. 
 It was the fourth year of the pastorate of the 
 Rev. John Stanton, a young man who had mani- 
 fested an increasing pulpit power, and was much 
 thought of by his people for his social qualities. 
 During his senior year in the seminary he had 
 been seriously considering the needs of the foreign 
 field, when he was called, quite unexpectedly, to a 
 flourishing church in the manufacturing town of 
 Denton. The call to the foreign work seeming to 
 be a more indefinite one, and the parents of his 
 fiancee being opposed to her going abroad, he had 
 concluded that an equally great opportunity for 
 
OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 the use of his talents offered itself in Denton, 
 whence after a few years he was called to Jacon- 
 sett. His ministry had not been unfruitful, so 
 far as numbers were concerned; yet he had never 
 felt altogether at ease in his heart as to the de- 
 cision made on leaving the seminary. He la- 
 mented the fact that all his efforts to increase his 
 church's interest in foreign missions had resulted 
 in so little; yet he was sometimes more than 
 dimly conscious of the fact that he was embar- 
 rassed in his appeals for this cause by the uncom- 
 fortable intruding thought: "Why did you not 
 heed the call yourself? How can you plead with 
 your people for men and money, when you might 
 have been one of the men yourself?" 
 
 There was not, in the nervelessness of his ap- 
 peals, that element, not unknown in the home 
 pulpit, of fear lest gifts for the foreign field should 
 rob the home field. No, Mr. Stanton knew full 
 well that no church has ever thriven through 
 withholding, and that no pastor ever starved 
 because his people were interested in foreign mis- 
 sions. Neither was he afraid of offending his 
 people by his zeal for the foreign work. But 
 the results were small, and year by year he faced 
 the disappointment of failure, rendered the more 
 poignant by his own sense of responsibility. 
 
 The presence of a furloughed missionary 
 speaker in his midweek meetings was by no 
 means a rare event, and he had once secured the 
 services of one of the secretaries of the Foreign 
 
OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 TEJ£ *>v 
 
 Board, for a Sunday morning address; but the 
 young pastor was always embarrassed by his own 
 weakness in seconding the appeal. And now, 
 as the time for another annual offering came 
 round, he was feeling so distressed over the pros- 
 pect that it almost made him ill. He determined 
 to devote much time to prayer over his prepara- 
 tion for the service on that day, and after a long, 
 hard week of study and meditation, on Saturday 
 evening he shut himself into his study for a last 
 earnest seeking of God's help and blessing. He 
 had been more fatigued than he knew, and, 
 while he prayed, he fell asleep and dreamed. 
 
 He was entering the church for the morning 
 service of Foreign Mission Sunday. As he opened 
 the door beside the pulpit, he was conscious of an 
 unusual expression on the faces of the congrega- 
 tion, which, as he had feared, w T as smaller than 
 usual. The cause was soon apparent. One of 
 the side seats in the pulpit was already occupied, 
 and by a stranger, who rose to meet him as he 
 ascended the steps. Where had he seen that 
 face before? It was one which would be notice- 
 able among ten thousand, not for any striking 
 beauty of feature, but for such a combination of 
 strength and sweetness as is rarely seen in any man, 
 for, with the best of man, it united the best of 
 woman, without even faintly suggesting the effemi- 
 nate. His manner, modest, unassuming, yet betok- 
 ened no feeling that he had not a right to be there. 
 He extended his hand, and said in a low voice: 
 
10 
 
 
 OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 "My brother, I have come at your earnest 
 invitation, as I have done many times before. 
 As your mind and those of this people, are yet 
 weak to discern spiritual realities, I, your Lord 
 and Master, have come this once in bodily form, 
 that henceforth you may feel more confidently 
 assured of my continual presence in your worship." 
 
 For a moment the minister could not speak, 
 but simply gazed into that matchless face, con- 
 vinced that there was no mistake, yet with an 
 unspeakable joy and a strong fear struggling for 
 the mastery in his heart. Then, with almost a 
 sigh of relief, he said : 
 
 "Lord, it is indeed thou; and my heart is filled 
 with thanksgiving for this blessed privilege; and 
 now thou wilt speak to my people to-day, and they 
 will heed the message as they would not mine. 
 The service is thine; conduct it as thou wilt." 
 
 "I will indeed speak to your people to-day, my 
 brother, but through your lips. Speak you what 
 you believe I would speak; and I will be with 
 your mouth, and teach you what you should say." 
 There was no use in arguing against those quiet, 
 decided, yet sympathetic tones. But how could 
 the minister ever lead his people in prayer, or 
 attempt to present the cause, while the Lord 
 himself sat beside him there in the pulpit? It 
 was impossible. 
 
 The organ prelude was ended, the first notes of 
 the long metre doxology were struck; mechan- 
 ically Mr. Stanton joined in the strains, stumbled 
 
OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 ^D 
 
 through the invocation, and made such work of 
 the psalter that his people gazed wonderingly at 
 him. He gave out the hymn, and sat down, his 
 head throbbing as if it would burst. He read 
 the Scripture lesson, without knowing what he 
 read, and said: "Let us pray." All heads were 
 bowed, and the people waited. The minister 
 tried to speak, but words would not come. At 
 last, in anguish of spirit and with tears streaming 
 down his cheeks, he turned about in the pulpit 
 and burst forth: 
 
 "Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O 
 Lord. I have been unfaithful to thee, unfaithful 
 to this people, and I am not worthy to stand up 
 before them to proclaim thy word. I have told 
 them of the almost countless thousands of thy 
 sheep who are wandering in the darkness of sin 
 and of ignorance, and have urged them to give 
 up their substance to seek and to save that which 
 is lost; but I have turned my own back on the 
 hand that was outstretched to call me to carry 
 the gospel to the heathen, when there was nothing 
 in the world to prevent my going, and I have chosen 
 the comparative comfort of a large home pastorate, 
 and the chance to make a reputation. O Lord, 
 forbid that, when I have preached to others, I 
 myself should be a castaway, unused of thee be- 
 cause I would not let thee use me as thou wouldest! 
 Forgive my sin, make me what thou wouldest 
 have me be, and send me where thou wouldest 
 have me go. And oh, have mercy upon this 
 
12 
 
 
 ^V ^ 
 
 OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 people! Let them not suffer for my sin, but give to 
 them a worthier shepherd, and arouse them to 
 earnest prayer and intelligent effort for the speedy 
 evangelization of this world of thine. For thine 
 own name's sake. Amen." 
 
 It was the most remarkable prayer ever offered 
 from that pulpit, the briefest and the most in- 
 tensely earnest, and there was hardly a dry eye 
 in the house when it was concluded. Mr. Stan- 
 ton's missionary sermon that day was hardly the 
 one which he had so laboriously prepared. His 
 lips had been opened, and in very truth did the 
 Lord teach him what he should speak. He 
 first told his people more fully of the struggle 
 through which he had passed on leaving the semi- 
 nary, and of his excusing himself from going out 
 as a foreign missionary. 
 
 "And now," said he, "I can never rest until I 
 have found out whether I am too old to correct 
 that mistake. If not, you must find another 
 pastor. If I cannot go, I shall stay with you, 
 but I shall not be the man I was before I saw my 
 Lord. My people, I have never been able to set 
 before you your responsibility for the world, as I 
 ought to have done, and I have mourned the fact; 
 but now I can say all that is in my heart; and in 
 the presence of the Christ of Calvary, I plead with 
 you for those for whom he died, and for whose 
 salvation he has commissioned every disciple to 
 go, so far as he may be able, unto the uttermost 
 parts of the earth. There are young people in 
 
OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 13 
 
 1 
 
 this church whom the love of Christ might well 
 constrain to devote their lives to this service. 
 There are men of means who could well afford the 
 joy of supporting a substitute on the foreign field. 
 And there is not one of us who will not be the 
 better for some sacrifice of our own ease and. com- 
 fort and luxury that the light of the knowledge 
 of the glory of God, in the face of Jesus Christ, 
 may shine out into the darkness. 
 
 "We have been but playing at this great work, 
 eagerly investing our millions in every form of 
 commercial enterprise for selfish gain, while we 
 have rather grudgingly dropped the pennies and the 
 nickels, and a few dollars, in the plate, to provide 
 for the sending of the gospel to millions of im- 
 mortal souls. Our young men have fought and 
 bled for their country; our young women have 
 hesitated at no peril in their devotion as nurses 
 of the sick; and parents have not held back the 
 willing offering. But the recruiting of soldiers of 
 the cross is a slow and disheartening task. The 
 country gladly poured out blood and treasures 
 like water to give Cuba's people freedom from 
 temporal oppression, but the church of a million 
 and a quarter members has called it 'conscience- 
 less begging' when called upon for a million 
 dollars and a few hundred young people to save a 
 billion heathen from the crushing slavery of sin. 
 
 "O my people, these things ought not so to be! 
 We cannot, we dare not, permit them to continue 
 so to be. We must have a part in the sacrifice 
 
14 
 
 OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 of those who have suffered and died in mission 
 lands, by at least giving until we feel it, and then, 
 like them, giving until we do not feel it. Here in 
 the presence of our Lord, I am more then ever 
 convinced that we, his church and his ministers, 
 have been grieving him beyond expression by 
 making a plaything of this greatest business in 
 the world, while we make a business of the things 
 which the Lord intended should be but playthings. 
 Never can we hope for the outpouring of his 
 blessing, until we seek first the kingdom of God 
 and his righteousness, bringing all the tithes 
 into the storehouse, that there may be meat in his 
 house. He looks not at how much we give, but 
 at how much we withhold. Some of us may not 
 have come prepared to respond to this new sense of 
 responsibility, which has come to us through the 
 realization of the presence of the Master him- 
 self; but I am sure that he will take our pledges. 
 He is testing our hearts to-day, not our purses. 
 His sacrifice for us was a glad one, though it 
 meant the cross. Let us follow him in joyful 
 offering." 
 
 This is but a brief outline of the sermon, which 
 moved that congregation as it had never been 
 moved before. There followed an indescribable 
 scene. Once more the Lord "sat over against 
 the treasury," as the people cast in their gifts. 
 The poor widow was there with her two mites, 
 and the Lord, as of old, smiled upon her and 
 blessed her. The man of moderate means was 
 
fi, 
 
 7i& 
 
 OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 ~*\ 
 
 15 
 
 there, and gave till he felt it; and the rich man 
 was there, who had been accustomed to "cast in 
 of his superfluity" a dollar bill, and then go home 
 and joke with his friends about how much of his 
 dollar would get to Africa. But it was not a dol- 
 lar this time. A dollar for missions in the pres- 
 ence of the Lord of life! No; he would be ashamed 
 to give it. He had a ten-dollar bill in his pocket; 
 how would that do? He smoked that much in a 
 couple of weeks. And this was for the salvation 
 of millions, for a year. How much did a whole 
 missionary cost, anyway? What would his wife 
 say if they should have one of their own? Afford 
 it? For that matter, he would hardly notice it. 
 And there was that strong, sweet face looking 
 into his face, yes, on down into his heart; and with 
 a new joy, which embarrassed him by its strange- 
 ness and sweetness, he slipped in a paper pledg- 
 ing himself and wife to the support of a new 
 missionary. 
 
 And there sat Elder Austin, one of the richest 
 men in the community, regular in attendance at 
 church, a faithful member of the session, but not 
 a believer in foreign missions. Was there not 
 far more that the church could do at home? was 
 his argument; surely he could not be expected to 
 convert other nations when there was such a 
 need of the gospel in America! But, somehow or 
 other, the suicidal selfishness of such a programme 
 struck him to-day as it never had done before. 
 What would he, and what would America, be 
 

 if, 
 
 OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 to-day, if that plan had been followed from the 
 time of Christ? Was it simply for America that 
 Christ had died? Were the men who had no 
 interest in foreign missions the most enthusiastic 
 in the home work, and the strongest spiritual 
 powers in the local church? For the first time he 
 saw the matter as his Lord saw it, when he stopped 
 not short of the uttermost parts of the earth in 
 his great commission to his disciples. 
 
 This thought brought others in its train. If 
 this be indeed the Lord's plan for his church, 
 surely the minister was right in saying that he 
 did not intend that the church should play with 
 this solemn responsibility, putting its millions 
 into commercial enterprise for selfish gain and 
 pleasure, its tens of thousands into the provision 
 of luxurious home churches, where the rich might 
 take comfort during a service and a sermon, 
 soothed by the beautiful architecture of the build- 
 ing, and the music of the trained choir, and con- 
 gratulate themselves that they were not as other 
 men; and putting only its pennies and dimes 
 and a few dollars into this vast work for the salva- 
 tion of a world. What a sublime faith it must 
 have taken, for the few who had been in earnest 
 about it, to work on, year after year, with the 
 church's pittances, while her rich men were living 
 for themselves, or at best adding to the magnifi- 
 cent endowments of some of the larger col- 
 leges or libraries, or contributing to local philan- 
 thropies. Why should not the Lord's work 
 
 St 
 
 
OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 have some of the millions? Did men leave any 
 other work to take care of itself because it was, 
 forsooth, a "work of faith"? It was at best the 
 excuse of an unpardonable selfishness. Over- 
 whelmed with a sense of shame for himself, and 
 for others like him, he rose to his feet, and stam- 
 mered out: 
 
 "Lord, have mercy upon me, a sinner! I have 
 given some portion of my time, my strength, my 
 means, to the work of this church; but I have turned 
 a deaf ear to the call of the need of heathen millions 
 for whom thou hast died. And the church which 
 calls itself thine has been playing at missions, grudg- 
 ingly sparing a handful of its young men and women, 
 and permitting them to suffer and toil, with a 
 meager support, while it rests at home and criti- 
 cises and orders retrenchment. We have let the 
 sons of the poor go to this field and have counted our 
 own sons too good for this sacrifice. How shall 
 we ever lift up our heads before thee to claim thy 
 blessing? We have come short even of the tithe 
 of the income, the minimum requirement under 
 the law; instead of realizing the larger privileges 
 and responsibilities which are ours under the 
 reign of the blessed liberty of love! Henceforth, 
 O Lord, I pledge myself that I will, if my wealth 
 continues with me, at least never give less for thy 
 work than I spend on myself and my family." 
 And, as to Zacchaeus of old, Jesus said to him: 
 "To-day I must abide at thy house." 
 
 A son of the elder had been sitting in the family 
 
is 
 
 OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 
 pew, amazed beyond measure by all that was 
 going on around him; but with the conviction 
 growing more and more intense that it meant more 
 for himself than he was willing to acknowledge. 
 Then began the struggle of his life. Reared in 
 luxury, of both natural and acquired refinement, in 
 the senior class of Gale University, possessed of an 
 original mind and quick perceptions, which had 
 made him the prize debater of his class, he had 
 looked forward to the study of the law and a bril- 
 liant career at the bar, of which friends, classmates, 
 and professors all had assured him. Could it be 
 possible that he was mistaken in this choice of a 
 profession? Was it indeed true, as he had un- 
 heedingly heard, that the majority of those who 
 went as missionaries were children of the compara- 
 tively poor, while those who had the means to 
 support themselves, without cost to the church, 
 rarely felt themselves called to turn aside from the 
 pursuit of wealth to take up this self-denying work ? 
 In vain he tried to think of an excuse for this; 
 not one would satisfy his conscience, in the pres- 
 ence of the Master. 
 
 "Why should you not go?" the question came to 
 him. "Would you regard it as a waste of your 
 time and talents to follow your Master in this 
 work ? W T ho gave you those talents, and to what 
 purpose?" 
 
 With head bowed low, he fought his battle, then 
 faced the Master in the joy of triumph, crying: 
 
 " Lord, what wilt thou have me to do ? Whether 
 
Smlg 
 
 OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 it be China, or India, or Africa, I will follow thee 
 whithersoever thou goest; and the money where- 
 with thou hast blessed me, but wherewith I was in 
 danger of cursing myself, shall provide for the 
 necessities of my work." 
 
 This was an almost heart-breaking announce- 
 ment to his father and mother; but they dared not, 
 nor would they, oppose any objection to this logical 
 application of the new spirit of the elder himself, 
 who simply sighed an "Amen," as the Lord ac- 
 cepted the volunteer. 
 
 There were many others in that congregation 
 who formed a new plan of life that day; but not 
 all. Some, alas, "went away sorrowful," for they 
 "had great possessions." 
 
 The minister had been sitting on the platform, 
 speechless, overwhelmed by what was going on 
 before him. Startled by a sudden sound, he turned 
 his head, and lo, he was not in the church, but 
 sitting in his study chair. His wife stood in the 
 doorway saying: 
 
 "John, it is past midnight; are you not coming 
 to bed?" 
 
c 
 
 20 
 
 OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 THOROUGHLY awakened by his wife's call, 
 bringing to him a realization of the strange- 
 ness of the dream which had come to him as 
 he sat in his study that night before Foreign Mission 
 Sunday, John Stanton hastily threw off his clothes 
 and went to bed, but not to sleep. There was no 
 need for further preparation of a sermon, since his 
 mind and heart were full to overflowing with that 
 new, strange, solemn yet glad, sense of the real, 
 personal presence of the Master, and with the assur- 
 ance that he had received his message to his peo- 
 ple ; but the vast outreach of the new thoughts, the 
 infinite possibilities of the new principle of action, 
 if made operative in his church, the logical future 
 for himself, — these things surged and resurged 
 through his mind, giving place gradually to a 
 joyful and quieting assurance that now, as never 
 before, he was in a position to make the best use 
 of his ministry, wheresoever the Lord might lead 
 him. And so he drifted into a dreamless slumber, 
 from which he awoke to a gloriously bright day 
 in what seemed a veritable new world, God's 
 world, in a sense which he had heretofore but 
 dimly comprehended. 
 
 It was not that this minister had previously had 
 no conception of the presence of Jesus Christ in 
 the world, or of his own personal relation to him. 
 
OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 21 
 
 
 He had not failed to tell his people that their fol- 
 lowing of Jesus Christ must be a very real thing, 
 that it involved self-denial and sacrifice, that the 
 cross must be borne if the crown was to be won and 
 worn; that Christ has promised to be with his 
 disciples always, even unto the end of the world; 
 yet it was evident to him now that, even to himself, 
 it had only been an ideal, with very little about it 
 of tangible reality. His thought of the spiritual 
 character of that presence, instead of meaning to 
 him the vast enlargement of the sphere of Christ's 
 influence, had deprived it of its definiteness and 
 of the greater part of the pow r er which it should 
 have had in his thought and life. He had prayed 
 at every service during his ministry for the presence 
 of the Holy Spirit in wisdom and power, and would 
 have borne testimony that his prayer had many 
 times been answered; he knew that what he had 
 prayed for was the spirit of Jesus Christ; yet 
 when, in his dream, his Master had visibly appeared 
 in the pulpit with him, it had been strangely dis- 
 concerting; had upset all his plans, had given him 
 new views of life; and he was very sure that the 
 effect of such an occurrence upon his people would 
 be much as he had seen it in his dream. 
 
 What did it all mean? Were Christian people 
 in general leading such lives as they w r ould not live 
 if the Christ were visibly present at their side? 
 Were they deciding questions of vital importance 
 in a way in which they would not dare, and could 
 not even wish, to decide them if Jesus were living 
 
 
 
OVER AGAINST THE TREASUR 
 
 with them as an inseparable companion? Could 
 it be true that Christians were putting far less into 
 the treasury of the Lord than they would offer — 
 not simply from fear, not merely from a sense of 
 shame, but also from a truer, purer motive — if they 
 should see Christ sitting over against the treasury ? 
 It was unquestionably true; but it was equally 
 unquestionable that it could not possibly be the 
 will of God that this should so be and continue 
 to be. 
 
 So far as he, John Stanton, was concerned, it 
 could never be so again. But could he make his 
 people see that which he had come to see himself ? 
 That was the question with him as he went about 
 his preparations for the morning service, surpris- 
 ing his wife by an unwonted quietness, yet intensity 
 of manner. More than once did she involuntarily 
 raise her head to glance at him as they knelt to- 
 gether for morning prayer. What had come over 
 this husband of hers in a single night ? The morn- 
 ing hours were too full for him to attempt to tell 
 her before the service of all that had come to him; 
 but his prayer was more simple, more direct, more 
 tenderly eloquent, than any that she had ever heard 
 him offer, and she awaited with more than the 
 usual interest the service in the church. 
 
 More than one of the members of the West- 
 minster Presbyterian Church took a second look 
 into their pastor's face that morning as he passed 
 from his room in the church into the pulpit and 
 took his seat. For a time his head was bowed in 
 
 J 
 
OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 *m 
 
 23 
 
 
 
 his hands in one final fervent appeal that the 
 
 presence of the Master might be as real a thing to 
 
 him as it had been in the visions of the night; 
 
 then he proceeded with the service. His people 
 
 had always thought Mr. Stanton a fine reader and 
 
 eloquent in prayer. He had taken much pains 
 
 with all his pulpit work and had given no little 
 
 study to oratorical effect. To-day, however, it 
 
 was not the arts of the elocutionist, nor the easy, 
 
 graceful flow of well-rounded periods, that took 
 
 hold of the people as they had never been taken 
 
 hold of before. Consciously in the presence of 
 
 the Lord himself, he drew his people into that 
 
 presence, into the very Holy of holies, and there 
 
 they abode throughout the service, seeing what 
 
 their pastor had seen, hearing what he had heard, 
 
 and growing more and more ready to do what he 
 
 had in vision seen them do. 
 
 There was but one text possible for John Stanton 
 
 that morning: 
 
 "And he sat down over against the treasury, and 
 beheld how the multitude cast money into the treasury." 
 
 The greater part of the sermon consisted of the 
 simple, earnest narration of the dream, omitting, 
 of course, any mention of the names of members 
 of the congregation who had figured in the vision. 
 As he described the scene it seemed to his audience 
 as if they too could see the strong, sweet face of 
 the Lord and Master of them all, looking into their 
 faces, and on down into their hearts, with such an 
 expression of love and longing as they had never 
 
 ^- 
 
 ^ 
 

 
 
 ^r — 
 
 OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 before seen. They saw the millions of heathen- 
 dom standing and calling by their great, unmet 
 need, "Come over and help us!" They saw their 
 own hearts, with all their selfishness. They saw 
 the stupidity and futility of their proposal to meet 
 that need with a handful of dollars and a few 
 half-hearted prayers. And they heard the Master 
 say, " Inasmuch as ye did it not unto one of these 
 least, ye did it not unto me." Yet, as Mr. Stanton 
 pictured the Saviour sitting by the treasury, he 
 scrupulously avoided urging his people to give 
 from fear of the one who sat there: every offering 
 must be from love of him, and from a moving, 
 constraining desire to please him who had pleased 
 not himself, but had made his life a willing sacri- 
 fice that all men of every race might be saved. 
 
 He closed with the words: "It was the intention 
 to have made our offering for the great work of 
 foreign missions this morning. Although I have 
 not had opportunity to consult with the other 
 members of the session, I shall venture to ask 
 you to postpone the offering until this evening. I 
 make this request for two reasons: first, I do not 
 wish one cent of our offering to be chargeable to 
 impulse, nor to have one of you feel by evening 
 that you were moved by the narration of a vision 
 to give more than you would have given in a soberer 
 moment. Moreover, it is quite possible that 
 some of you have not come prepared to give all 
 that you now feel you ought and wish to give. 
 If you have seen the Lord Christ face to face this 
 
 
OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 25 
 
 
 morning, as I have, you will be here this evening, 
 and will make your offerings with a realizing 
 sense that he does indeed sit over against the 
 treasury, ready to bless you as you give your gifts 
 to him, not to a board or a cause, or even to the 
 church or the unevangelized millions, but to him 
 who loved us and washed us from our sins in his 
 own blood. Therefore, let us first give our own 
 selves unto the Lord. 
 
 "Our ever blessed Saviour and Master, we 
 thank thee for the revelation of thyself which thou 
 hast given us this day. May it mean unmeasured 
 blessing in all the days that are to come. May thy 
 living, loving, quickening, constraining presence 
 be a more real thing in our lives henceforth. 
 Infinite spirit as thou art, forbid that we should 
 regard thee as only a spirit, and, as such, not 
 merely without flesh and blood, but without 
 definite contact with the life of to-day. As infi- 
 nite spirit, take thou such complete possession 
 of our spirits that henceforth for us to live shall be 
 Christ, that we may think thy thoughts and speak 
 thy words and do thy deeds, multiplying by as 
 many fold as we are more than one in number, 
 the beneficent, life-giving influences which were 
 present and potent in thy blessed person when 
 thou wast visibly dwelling in this world. May we 
 bear the burden of sorrow thou didst bear for a 
 world lying in wickedness. May we yearn, as 
 thou didst yearn, to seek and to save that which is 
 lost, of every race and tongue. Forbid that any 
 
26 
 
 OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 one of us should do less for foreign missions 
 than thou wouldest do wert thou in the place of 
 that one. Bring before us the vision of the world's 
 great need; make to ring in our ears the great 
 commission; impress upon us the full meaning 
 of thy cross and thy promise; until our hearts are 
 moved with the compassion which moved thy 
 heart, and we are filled with the courage which 
 filled thy breast, and become eager to offer thee 
 our possessions and our lives for such use as thou 
 wilt make of them. In thine own name, and for 
 thine own glory we ask it. Amen." 
 
 As the congregation joined in singing the old 
 familiar "Missionary Hymn," for the first time 
 in their lives many of the members of that church 
 realized the full personal application of the third 
 stanza, the most frequently omitted of all the 
 hymn: 
 
 "Can we, whose souls are lighted 
 
 With wisdom from on high, 
 Can we to men benighted 
 
 The lamp of life deny ? 
 Salvation! O salvation! 
 
 The joyous sound proclaim, 
 Till each remotest nation 
 
 Has learned Messiah's name." 
 
 The impression made by the service had been 
 too solemn to admit of the usual social conversa- 
 tion about the church doors and on the way home. 
 The talking would come later; but there was a 
 vast amount of thinking to be done first. 
 
 To some members of the session the postpone- 
 
- /T >c* 
 
 
 OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 27 
 
 
 ment of the offering until the evening service had 
 seemed at first of very questionable expediency, 
 for, as in most churches, this service was, as a 
 rule, much more lightly attended than that of the 
 morning; but the more they thought of the effect 
 produced upon themselves by their pastor's 
 words, the more convinced they became that the 
 attendance that evening would not be light, nor 
 the offering the less for its postponement. 
 
 And they were right. There were a few who 
 would not go. They had been talking all the 
 afternoon about the childishness of dreams, and 
 their utter inappropriateness in the pulpit. More- 
 over, it was irreverent to try to bring Christ down 
 again in this fashion. It seemed like materialism, 
 and might even incline toward fetichism and 
 idolatry. Christ was a divine and spiritual being, 
 and should be worshiped and served spiritually, 
 and not as a being of flesh and blood. Some of 
 them even suspected their pastor of Unitarian 
 tendencies in his emphasis on the human nature 
 of Christ. And as to the heathen, were they not 
 responsible for their own condition? The only 
 good Chinaman was a dead Chinaman, and to 
 attempt to take the gospel to China was nothing 
 more nor less than casting pearls before swine. 
 Had they not just recently turned again and rent 
 those who had gone to them with the gospel? 
 If the Lord wanted them in his kingdom, surely he 
 was able to bring them there without the waste of the 
 lives and the hard-earned money of Christian people! 
 

 28 OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 
 
 
 
 Among those who remained away were two of 
 the wealthy men of the church, who did not dare 
 to go. They were outwardly correct in their man- 
 ner of life and regular in attendance at church; 
 but they had gone away from the morning service 
 sorrowful, because they "had great possessions." 
 
 But almost everyone who had been present in 
 the morning returned in the evening, and with 
 them so many of their relatives and neighbors 
 that chairs had to be brought in from the lecture 
 room to seat the company that gathered. 
 
 After a brief service of praise and the reading 
 of Scripture, Mr. Stanton offered this simple 
 prayer: 
 
 " O Thou who in the days of thy visible presence 
 in the world didst sit over against the treasury 
 in the temple, to observe the manner of the love 
 which those who delighted to call themselves the 
 people of God bare to him; we have gathered here 
 to-night for none other purpose than to prove our 
 love for thee by the gifts which we are about to 
 cast into thy treasury. We are not going to give 
 to thee grudgingly or of necessity, for that is not 
 the way in which thou hast given to us. We are 
 not going to give because we see thee sitting over 
 against the treasury and fear thy wrath if our 
 gifts are small. Nay, Lord, our most earnest 
 desire to-night is that we may see thee sitting there, 
 may be assured that the gifts of our love are 
 acceptable in thy sight, and may go forth from this 
 place with a new joy in the knowledge that we are 
 
 
 

 .— m 
 
 OF£i? 4G,4/iV.Sr THE TREASURY 29 
 
 continuing and increasing that work for which 
 thou didst come into the world, and into which 
 thou didst send forth thy disciples. Let there be 
 no self-deception among us, preventing an abso- 
 lute surrender and full consecration. Let there 
 be no thought of what our friends or our neighbors 
 are doing, or of what they may think of what we 
 are doing. May we forget everyone but thyself; 
 and be thou the most real presence here. May 
 our bringing of the tithes into the storehouse, that 
 there may be meat in thine house, open for us the 
 windows of heaven that thou mayest pour us out 
 such a blessing that there shall not be room enough 
 to receive it. We take thee at thy word. Amen:" 
 
 There was no sermon. For the sake of those 
 who might not have been present in the morning, 
 Mr. Stanton made a brief statement of the purpose 
 of the service, and that which had led to the post- 
 ponement of the offering. Then he said: 
 
 "Each one who wishes to make an offering may 
 do so with the utmost privacy by using one of the 
 envelopes which have been placed in the pews; 
 but, as all will wish to give something, there can be 
 no harm, and there may be some advantage, in 
 dispensing with the baskets, and having each one 
 come in turn to the chest which has been placed 
 before the pulpit, to deposit his offering. If the 
 experiences of any during this day have been of 
 such a character as might prove helpful to others, 
 an opportunity will be afforded them to relate these 
 experiences when making their offerings. And if 
 
30 OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 any are disposed to offer their lives for the Lord's 
 work, let that fact also be written on paper, to be 
 dropped in the treasury. But let us all know of it 
 for our inspiration. 
 
 " As it is fitting that I, your pastor, be an example 
 to the church, permit me to make my offering first. 
 It is twofold. As I have already intimated, acting 
 under a conviction which I cannot escape, I am 
 offering my life for foreign mission service, to go 
 into that work unless the board considers me too 
 old, or otherwise disqualified for the service. You 
 will have no serious difficulty in securing another 
 pastor, while the board is unable to secure half 
 the men it needs, and the fields are white to the 
 harvest. But while this matter is pending, I 
 cannot go on living in the delightful manse you have 
 provided for us, with all the comforts and many of 
 the luxuries of life, and giving as little as I have 
 given for the salvation of those who are in heathen 
 darkness. So long as we remain here, my wife 
 and I purpose to make ourselves responsible for 
 the salaries of two native helpers, and for the 
 support of a native boy and girl in Christian schools. 
 To these latter objects our children will also con- 
 tribute as they may be able. 
 
 "Now let us for the time being dismiss the 
 thoughts which may arise in connection with my 
 proposal to leave this church, which has grown so 
 dear to me, and proceed with our offerings. Will 
 the elders of the church first make their offerings? " 
 
 
OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 31 
 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 ABSOLUTE stillness, and a seriousness which 
 /-\ profoundly impressed even the curious sight- 
 seer, reigned throughout the church for a 
 moment after the pastor had ceased speaking and 
 remained standing at the desk. Then there arose 
 from one of the front pews and moved forward to 
 the treasury the oldest member of the session, 
 Elder Stanhope, his white head a crown of glory, 
 and his voice still strong and clear in spite of his 
 nearly fourscore years, as he spoke with measured 
 words and evidently intense feeling: 
 
 "Fellow-Christians, as it was proper for our 
 pastor, as the chief overseer of the flock, to set us 
 all an example in the declaration of his renewed 
 and enlarged purposes of consecration to the serv- 
 ice of our blessed Master, so it is proper that I, 
 the oldest of the under-shepherds, should be the 
 next to declare how profoundly I have been moved 
 by the events and the thoughts of this day. I 
 could, with great personal satisfaction, fervently 
 repeat the 'Nunc Dimittis,' and go to my eternal 
 rest in peace, having in deed and truth seen this 
 day the Lord Christ, were it not for the feeling, 
 which has pressed upon me with overwhelming 
 force to-day, that I have been an unprofitable 
 servant, an unfaithful steward; and that I must 
 beg the permission of my merciful Master to remain 
 
 ? 
 
 
32 
 
 sr 
 
 OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 here in this world a little while longer, — instead of 
 departing to be with Christ, which is far better, — 
 in order that I may have opportunity to set right, 
 in some small measure, the wrongs of my steward- 
 ship. If I live in the possession of my intellectual 
 powers until to-morrow night, the members of my 
 family who may survive me will be the poorer by 
 that portion of my goodly estate which should have 
 been in the hands of the Lord for his own work 
 long ago; but they will be the richer by the memory 
 of an old man a hundredfold happier than he has 
 ever been in his long life before, because he will 
 have paid his honest debts, instead of transferring 
 his estate to others to avoid the payment. 
 
 "It is not necessary for me to proclaim here the 
 amount for which I am placing pledges in the 
 treasury: it is enough to say that, if our pastor 
 leaves us to go to the foreign field, the income of 
 my offering will be sufficient to maintain him there 
 as one of the foreign pastors of this church. I say 
 'one,' for I believe that under the impulse of the 
 vision which we have seen to-day almost as vividly 
 as our pastor, we shall be able to support representa- 
 tives in more than one field, at home and abroad. 
 
 "There is one thing that troubles me, for it is 
 a wrong that I have no power to set right. My 
 children are all grown. Of not one of them am I 
 ashamed; but not one of them is in the ministry of 
 the gospel of Jesus Christ; not one has given his 
 life to missionary service; and now they are all 
 past age. May God forgive me that I never urged 
 
OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 them to consider that service, because I too lightly- 
 esteemed it, and because I feared the sacrifice for 
 them and possible partings for myself. But I have 
 grandchildren, and I feel to-night that no greater 
 joy could come to me than the decision of some of 
 them to heed the call of the world's greatest need. 
 I have never been opposed to foreign missions; I 
 have believed in the work, spoken for it, and sup- 
 ported it — in that absurdly inadequate way in 
 which the church has been so generally sustaining 
 it; but I cannot face this treasury, and see my Lord 
 in very deed sitting beside it, and continue to con- 
 tribute the insignificant fraction of the reserve of 
 my income which I have been in the habit of con- 
 tributing. O friends, it is good to come out into 
 the larger light before the mind loses its sensitive- 
 ness to that light. I bless God for this day!" 
 
 So deep was the agitation of the venerable and 
 beloved elder as he spoke these words and dropped 
 his pledge into the treasury that tears sprang un- 
 bidden to many eyes. 
 
 Then rose Elder Preston, a man of sixty, wiry, 
 nervous, — fussy, some called him, — and inclined 
 to be close. He was by no means so well-to-do as 
 Elder Stanhope, nor was he so well-beloved. He 
 also walked forward to the treasury, hesitated, 
 swaying from one foot to the other, and finally 
 burst out: 
 
 "Brethren, — if you will let me call you by that 
 name, — there isn't a meaner man on the face of 
 the earth than I feel myself to be to-night. Here 
 
OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 I 
 
 I am, an elder in the Presbyterian Church, a fairly 
 successful business man, able to live in comfort, 
 though not what one would call wealthy in these 
 days; yet I am compelled to say to you here to- 
 night that I have only given about two dollars per 
 year to the biggest work the church has to do, the 
 work of making Jesus Christ known to millions 
 of heathen. I have just waked up to the realiza- 
 tion that it would take about a million years to do 
 it, if everyone gave at that rate; and that mean- 
 while I am doing just about my level best to keep 
 Christ out of his kingdom. 
 
 "But to tell the truth, I never before saw Christ 
 passing the collection plate on Foreign Mission 
 Sunday. I never thought of him taking up my 
 two-dollar bill, and looking at it and then at me, 
 as if he wanted to set me to thinking where I had 
 put the other four thousand nine hundred and 
 ninety-eight dollars he had given me that year. 
 I just freed my conscience of the heathen for an- 
 other year; and when the monthly concerts came 
 around, if I was present, I just settled back in my 
 seat in the comfortable assurance that I had paid 
 in advance for that year, and the appeals for help 
 did not mean me. I would have been ashamed to 
 give nothing; but that peace of conscience was the 
 cheapest thing I ever bought, — and the dearest. 
 It was not even worth what it cost, for it was like 
 spending two dollars a year to buy leanness for my 
 own soul. I always skipped the kind of missionary 
 articles that get on the nerves of a stingy man, the 
 
OVER AGAINST THE TREASUR 
 
 pathetic appeals for men and money; but kind of 
 enjoyed the sort that tell about the customs of the 
 people, and give the statistics of converts from 
 heathenism, for those made my miserable little 
 two dollars seem to swell to about two hundred 
 dollars; and I felt as if some of those converts were 
 really mine. But I tell you, brethren and sisters, 
 that two dollars didn't look much like two hundred 
 dollars this morning; it looked a great deal more 
 like the 'thirty cents' we sometimes hear about on 
 the street. 
 
 "lam getting pretty well along in years now, and 
 I can't make up for the years that are gone; but 
 I am going to do something in that direction, and 
 the Board of Foreign Missions may count on me 
 for one thousand dollars a year as long as I am 
 prospered as I am now; and perhaps we can fix 
 it so that the subscription may go on after I am 
 dead. As you know, I am just a plain, blunt man, 
 and not much of a speech-maker; but I want you 
 to know that this is both the saddest and the hap- 
 piest day of my life." 
 
 And with the first tears in his eyes that anyone 
 present had ever seen there, he slipped in his pledge 
 and took his seat. 
 
 In order of seniority, it had now come to the elder 
 who had figured in John Stanton's vision the night 
 before; and the pastor wondered whether that 
 vision was to be fulfilled. He had delicately handled 
 this portion of his vision in narrating it, fearing, 
 on the one hand, to deprive his people of any good 
 
36 
 
 OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 influence of a message which seemed so truly from 
 God, and dreading, on the other hand, either to 
 overinfluence or to offend the elder in question. 
 He had not long to wait, for Elder Austin arose and 
 came forward, saying: 
 
 "Friends, destinies are in the making here to- 
 night, and among them my own. However deli- 
 cately our pastor tried to conceal the fact this 
 morning, I presume it was as clear to you as it was 
 to me that I was the elder whom he saw in his 
 vision, for I believe it was a God-given vision, 
 rather than any dream in the ordinary sense. I 
 have been a regular attendant at church, and en- 
 deavored to be a faithful member of the session; 
 but I have never believed in foreign missions. It 
 would be a very difficult matter to tell why; but 
 I think the chief reason must have been that my 
 religion has been more a thing of the head than the 
 heart; my knowledge of Jesus Christ has been one 
 of study and not one of personal contact; and I 
 have never come into such sympathetic touch with 
 him as to be able to see things from his point of 
 view. If anyone had asked me if I thought the 
 heathen were to have any share in the salvation 
 wrought out by Jesus Christ, I should probably 
 have said : 'Yes, I suppose that Christ died for them 
 also, and some day they will be reached by the 
 gospel; but now is the day of opportunity and 
 responsibility in our own great land, where there 
 are millions of practical heathen, toward whom we 
 have a patriotic as well as a religious obligation. 
 
OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 Ie 
 
 Their number is being increased every year by 
 immigration and birth, and the church is not be- 
 ginning to keep pace with this great work. Let 
 the children first be fed before the bread is thrown 
 to the dogs. All the religious forces of the country 
 combined are not sufficient to make a thoroughly 
 Christian land of this; so why should we trouble 
 ourselves about the other side of the world? Not 
 only charity, but also evangelization, should begin 
 at home.' So I argued with myself, and with many 
 another who has asked my opinion, and never till 
 this morning did I realize, as our pastor said, 'the 
 suicidal selfishness of such a programme.' 
 
 "For the first time I have to-day thanked God 
 that he would not permit the early disciples to sink 
 into the rut of any such theory, that he used per- 
 secution and miracle and supernatural vision and 
 dream to lead or compel them to go out, and send 
 out, to other lands, while as yet the work in their 
 own land was only in its infancy. Had he not done 
 so, there is no manner of possibility that you and I 
 should now be enjoying the liberties and blessings 
 of a Christian land, or the possession of Christian 
 truth for this life and hope for the life to come. 
 Moreover, I looked about me, and saw that what 
 makes the men of power in the church is not the 
 'smug provincialism' which sees only America and 
 her people, and seeks only her prosperity, and which 
 logically would confine itself to its own village, its 
 own family, its own exaggerated self; but the 
 world-wide sympathy and effort. 
 

 
 38 OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 "Who are the men and women whom you and I 
 really most revere and love in this church? Are 
 they those who are doing nothing for foreign mis- 
 sions? We all know that they are not. I have no 
 doubt at all that I should have proved twice as 
 useful a church member and elder, and have given 
 three times what I have to home missions, if I had 
 not narrowed my heart down to the smaller con- 
 ception of Christ's commission to his church. 
 With Christ sitting over against the treasury, the 
 work of my conversion did not take very long; but 
 my thinking could not stop there. Although it is 
 the Sabbath, I think God will forgive me for having 
 spent a good part of the day over figures. WTien 
 this church was built, I gladly put twenty thousand 
 dollars into it, that our little company of the elect 
 might have a beautiful and comfortable church 
 home, and that the small section of the city for 
 which we are chiefly responsible might be attracted 
 here rather than to other churches. When Calvin 
 University needed a new gymnasium and swimming 
 tank, I gave them fifty thousand dollars for it, 
 that the boys of my alma mater might show up 
 well in intercollegiate sports; and, as you know, I 
 built a library for the town at a cost of one hundred 
 thousand dollars. At the same time I was investing 
 certain other thousands in the factories and rail- 
 roads in which I am interested; and have had in 
 each case the satisfaction of knowing that I was 
 either helping my fellow-men, or contributing to 
 my own material welfare. Meanwhile I have 
 
i 
 
 OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 39 
 
 
 
 J 
 
 given one hundred dollars per year to home mis- 
 sions, as much more to local charities, and not one 
 cent to foreign missions. And there is many an- 
 other who is doing just this sort of thing, and 
 letting his humanitarian efforts, the architecture of 
 beautiful buildings, and the music of expensive 
 choirs, lull his soul into a self-congratulation and 
 satisfaction for which there is no warrant in the 
 word of God. These things ought I to have done, 
 but not have left the other undone. 
 
 "And let me tell you, my friends, that those 
 things which we have left undone must be done on 
 the same business principles, the same generous 
 scale, on which these things which we have done 
 are regularly done, or we shall never overtake the 
 work which has been given us to do. I was reading 
 this afternoon of a mission station in China, where 
 there are fifteen missionaries, including wives, at 
 work for two million people; and the total sum 
 given them for the maintenance of two churches, 
 two hospitals, two dispensaries, a boys' boarding 
 school of seventy pupils, a kindergarten, a theologi- 
 cal seminary, evangelistic itineration and station 
 work for men and women, five day schools for 
 children, ten country chapels, and the salaries of 
 preachers, colporteurs, Bible-women and teachers 
 to the number of thirty, is three thousand five hun- 
 dred dollars! One school alone would require sev- 
 eral times that amount here at home. Of course, 
 labor of all kinds is cheaper and living is lower; but, 
 friends, do we think for a moment that the world 
 
 
c 
 
 (a 
 
 OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 "^^ 
 
 is going to be evangelized by expenditure on that 
 scale? Single men give their ten to thirty millions 
 for single home enterprises, while all that more 
 than a million and a quarter of Presbyterians can 
 scrape together for the evangelization of hundreds 
 of millions who sit in darkness and the shadow of 
 death is an average of one dollar apiece! 
 
 "I tell you, friends, I was educated for business 
 almost from my first lisp, and it does not take two 
 minutes of a business man's time to see, without 
 the shadow of a doubt, that we are not administer- 
 ing the kingdom of God on business principles. Is 
 it possible that we are saying to ourselves, 'Not by 
 might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith Je- 
 hovah,' so we need not bring business principles to 
 bear upon this work? If so, may God forgive the 
 wickedness of our selfish withholding, and the 
 greater wickedness of our untrue and unholy 
 excuse! Was there ever a business which so in- 
 sistently demanded the application of business 
 principles as 'the King's business'? Was there 
 ever a steward who dared to say to his monarch, as 
 an excuse for the slack performance of his duty, 
 'O King, thou art all powerful: thy servant did not 
 think it necessary to do anything'? But that is 
 just what I have been saying to my King, and the 
 wonder is that he has used me at all in spite of it. 
 
 "I have come to a very definite conclusion, 
 friends, and that is that I, for one, am going to do 
 business with and for my Lord, on the same prin- 
 ciples, the same scale, which have made me what 
 
"Eg 
 
 OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 41 
 
 n 
 
 
 you call a prosperous man. From this time forth, 
 I propose to give to the work of foreign missions 
 annually, at least as much as I spend on the living 
 of myself and family; and, that I may do at least 
 a little toward righting the uneven balance of the 
 past, I propose at once to endow that theological 
 seminary in China, to which I have referred, to 
 the extent of one hundred thousand dollars. This 
 is all I am in a position to do now; but, if my life 
 is spared, this is not the end. It is but poor 
 atonement for the selfish, narrow, foolish past. 
 Why should not the Lord's work have some of the 
 millions? Why should these millions all be spent 
 on the things which, directly or indirectly, minister 
 to ourselves and our nearest neighbors, while the 
 Board of Foreign Missions reports a deficit of one 
 hundred and seventy thousand dollars, and the 
 church talks retrenchment ? The church shall not 
 retrench this year, if I have to sell at a sacrifice 
 and make good the whole deficit myself!" 
 
 His best friends could hardly recognize Elder 
 Austin, as, contrary to all precedent, he poured 
 forth this torrent of eloquent self-denunciation, 
 resolution and appeal, while the perspiration 
 streamed from his brow in the intensity of his 
 feeling. A revolution had been truly wrought in 
 the man in the course of a single day. 
 
 It was now the turn of Elder Went worth; and a 
 man of fifty, tall, slender, dressed neatly, but in 
 clothing which had evidently seen the wear of 
 many seasons, arose; a quiet, unassuming man, 
 
42 OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 yet one of the strongest spiritual factors in the 
 church, and one to whom both pastor and people 
 turned for all manner of sympathy and sugges- 
 tion. Little had he of silver or gold to give, but 
 such as he had he gave with a liberality and an 
 evident pleasure which had always made it seem 
 far more than it really was. A believer in Chris- 
 tian missions of every kind he had always been; 
 and out of his meager income he had always found 
 something annually for every board of the church. 
 Indeed, it was believed that it was his generous 
 interest in everyone else which had kept him poor. 
 Sickness in his family and unfortunate invest- 
 ments had contributed their share, and he was 
 really one of the poorest men in the church. 
 
 Happy as the day is long, his face fairly beamed 
 with delight as he now stepped to the front and 
 faced the congregation, saying: 
 
 "Well, friends, I knew that there was a good 
 day coming for our beloved church. Sometimes 
 it used to seem as if we were dead set against 
 getting the best out of life by our insisting on getting 
 the most out of it, and were just paying down 
 enough, as we thought, to hold on to reserved 
 seats in heaven, while we ate, drank and were 
 merry here. The Lord never let me be tempted, 
 as he has some of you, with much of this world's 
 goods; perhaps because he knew he could not 
 trust me with more than a small share; but I 
 doubt if any of the wealthy men in this church 
 have gotten more satisfying pleasure out of their 
 
"TE8 
 
 OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 43 
 
 
 much than I have out of my little. I have never 
 envied one of them before now; but the strange 
 thing about my joy to-night is that, for the first 
 time in my life, I have a feeling of envy toward 
 my brethren. I never felt any inclination to 
 envy them the money they spent on themselves 
 or their families, or the money they laid up, or 
 even the money they have given for colleges and 
 libraries. But to-night I just do envy them their 
 power to put their hands into their pockets and 
 take out a missionary for Korea, a theological 
 seminary for China, a doctor for Africa and a 
 college for India, and feel that when that thrill is 
 past they can afford another one by doing it again. 
 u O brethren, that is a kind of pleasure, a kind 
 of luxury, that I can never expect to enjoy; but 
 in spite of that unavoidable heart-hunger at the 
 very thought of being able to do such things, 
 I am just about bursting with joy at the knowl- 
 edge that they are to be done, and that my old 
 friends and colleagues are going to have the joy 
 of doing them. And I am not going to be left out 
 entirely. My wife and I have been talking the 
 matter over this afternoon, and we believe that 
 we can both pull through another winter without 
 the new clothing for which we have been saving 
 lately; and we are going to treat ourselves to a 
 scholarship in that theological seminary, if one of 
 them happens to be left unprovided for by the 
 generosity of Brother Austin. This is to be over 
 and above any little gifts we have been in the habit 
 

 44 OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 of making to foreign missions, and it is just to 
 celebrate the coming of the good times to the church 
 in Jaconsett in answer to many hopes and prayers. 
 Our Master has certainly visited us in person. 
 May it be to remain with us as evidently real as he 
 seemed this morning! " 
 
 With another of his radiant smiles, which always 
 awoke a general response, this well-loved elder 
 resumed his seat. 
 
 Elder Ogden promptly took his place. A com- 
 paratively young man, about forty years of age, 
 very successful in his practice as a lawyer, he and 
 his wife were leading spirits in the social life of the 
 church, and also in the Sabbath school, where each 
 conducted a large class. As they were general 
 favorites, their influence was large, and it had been 
 a source of much grief to the pastor that these 
 young people, whom he found so congenial in 
 almost every way, did not appear to be deeply 
 spiritually minded, and in particular were without 
 interest in other than the local work of the church, 
 their regard for which seemed to be somewhat 
 that of a man for his club. Yet so clean was 
 Lawyer Ogden's record, and so great was the popu- 
 larity both of himself and his wife with the young 
 people of the church, that Mr. Stanton had not 
 felt justified in opposing the suggestion of his 
 election as an elder, though he rather trembled 
 for the Ark of God when committed to his care. 
 
 Though Elder Ogden maintained his usual 
 command of himself this evening, yet it was evi- 
 
tL 
 
 OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 Z3 
 
 
 dent to all, before he began speaking, that some- 
 thing new and strange had come into his life that 
 day. 
 
 "Friends," he began, "lawyers are supposed to 
 know how to talk, at any time and on any side of 
 a subject, and I have been in the habit of congrat- 
 ulating myself on the possession of, perhaps, an 
 unusual degree of readiness in the use of the 
 English language. I must confess that it has 
 forsaken me to-night, and that I would much 
 rather keep my mouth entirely closed. It makes a 
 big difference in the fluency of a man's speech 
 whether he is looking to his own honor or to his 
 own shame; and the latter is all that I am likely 
 to achieve to-night, for, like some who have pre- 
 ceded me, I have a confession to make. But my 
 confession is a sadder one than theirs, for I have 
 been, in plain words, a renegade, a turncoat, and 
 that in the matter of the use of a whole life. I 
 would have given anything to escape being made 
 an elder in this church, because I knew that I was 
 not worthy. Yet, as it would almost surely help 
 me in the practice of my profession to hold that 
 position, and as I could not refuse it without 
 offending good friends in the church, I accepted 
 the election, and have tried to make as good an 
 elder as a man with an unrepented heart-wrong 
 could make. You have been kindly indulgent, 
 because you saw the effort and did not know the 
 whole story. 
 
 "I have for eighteen years been unfaithful to a 
 
46 OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 vow. I was among the earliest of the regular 
 student volunteers, having formed the decision in 
 my sophomore year at college. I was an active, 
 earnest Christian at that time, and a summer 
 spent in Bible study at Mt. Hermon had con- 
 vinced me that, so great was the disproportion 
 between the forces sent to the foreign field and 
 those retained at home, the burden was on every 
 man who was free and able to go as a missionary 
 to prove why he should not do so. There was no 
 romance about this for me, no excitement; but 
 the calm, deliberate conviction that, as I was both 
 free and able to go, and as there was a desperate 
 need, I must and would go, unless the providence 
 of God stepped very clearly in the way. To this 
 conviction I adhered firmly to the end of my 
 senior year, deriving neither great elation nor 
 great depression from my volunteer decision, but 
 doing what I could to secure other decisions from 
 fellow-students, and succeeding in a number of 
 cases because the cold logic of the situation "was 
 irresistible when constantly brought to bear upon 
 the minds of thinking men in student intercourse. 
 "I planned to enter the theological seminary 
 that autumn. For a good, thorough rest, I took a 
 summer, roughing it in the Adirondacks, with 
 two or three classmates and some good friends 
 from the previous class, who had taken their first 
 years of professional studies and were eager for 
 a good holiday. We did not propose anything 
 violent, even in the way of exercise, but just to 
 
 r 
 
OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 enjoy nature and one another. We spent our 
 evenings about a big camp fire, and discussed 
 many things, past, present and future, realistic 
 and idealistic, no doubt talking some wisdom and a 
 great deal of foolishness. I had taken good rank in 
 debate while in college, and, I suppose, must have 
 become a sort of leader in these discussions in 
 the woods, for the fellows applauded me more 
 vigorously than they did anyone else. At last 
 one night a fellow who had been attending a New 
 York law school cried out : 
 
 '"That's a master argument, Ned, my boy; 
 and I don't believe there's a man in our class at 
 Columbia who could come anywhere near it on 
 the spur of the moment. You were cut out for a 
 lawyer, and no mistake. Don't be so preposter- 
 ously idiotic as to hide that talent of yours in a 
 missionary napkin out in the wilds of Africa. 
 There are hosts of poor pettifoggers in the law; 
 but there's lots of room at the top, and that's 
 where you'll get without half trying. It is true 
 that it takes logic and eloquence to make a suc- 
 cessful minister; and I suppose even the cannibals 
 would rather listen to an orator than to a tomb- 
 stone; but there are varieties of logic and elo- 
 quence, and if I ever saw a born lawyer, you 
 are one.' 
 
 "At first I simply pooh-poohed at the fulsome 
 flattery and the effort to switch me off; but that 
 fellow kept at me most persistently; and one 
 night there walked into our camp Professor 
 
. 
 
 48 OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 Bailey of Columbia Law School, one of Maxon's 
 teachers, whom, as I learned afterwards, Maxon 
 had, since our first talk, coaxed to come over from 
 another part of the woods for my especial benefit. 
 Suffice it to say that flattery and cajolery and bril- 
 liantly painted impressionistic visions of my rich 
 and honored future proved too much for the de- 
 cision, which had ever been rather of my intellect 
 than of my heart, and I entered Columbia Law 
 School in the fall, instead of entering Auburn 
 Theological Seminary. 
 
 "Most of the results you know. A moderate 
 measure of riches and honor has already come to 
 me. With no so-called 'bad habits,' I have yet 
 lived a gay society life, really more to drown the 
 frequently troublesome voice of conscience than 
 from any great love for worldly things. In spite 
 of this uneasiness, I have never deeply regretted 
 my change of mind, from the first year in law 
 school, when I resolutely stifled one or two fierce 
 protests of conscience, until to-day. But to-day, 
 in the presence of the Lord sitting by the treasury, 
 I have seen my life in a new light, and loathed 
 myself as one who has deliberately turned from a 
 life of unselfish devotion to God and my fellow- 
 men to a life of selfish devotion to his own earthly 
 advantage and material enjoyment. I know that 
 our pastor has mourned over my lack of spiritu- 
 ality, and has feared for the influence of my 
 worldliness on the young people of the church; 
 but I do not suppose that he has ever suspected 
 
OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 49 
 
 
 that it was all due to heart-unrest, the result of 
 the deliberate breaking of a right and wise promise 
 made to my God and Saviour. I had yielded to 
 the constraint of ambition and resisted the con- 
 straint of the love of Christ. The mistake which 
 our pastor has acknowledged is similar, yet not 
 the same. It may be that personal ambition 
 entered into his decision to remain at home, but 
 it did not fill his whole heart, as it did mine. 
 It was a choice with him of two fields of work for 
 Christ, while with me the choice was between 
 Christ and self." 
 
 "Don't say that, Brother Ogden!" cried out 
 Mr. Stanton. "My choice was as really and 
 fully a choice of self as was yours, for Christ, my 
 own personal Christ, was leading to the foreign 
 field, and I would not follow." 
 
 "Well, my dear pastor, however that may be, 
 you find room for repentance, while I fear I shall 
 not. If there is any field where you want a mis- 
 sionary lawyer, here am I, Lord, send me; or if 
 there is any place where you want a self-sup- 
 porting, converted lawyer as a preacher, here am 
 I, Lord, send me. If I am not wanted out there, 
 the best atonement I can make is to see to it 
 that all the money that I make, over and above 
 moderate living expenses, goes to the work of 
 saving men, and that my personal influence tells 
 in the same direction. Do not misunderstand me, 
 and draw the inference that I believe no man is 
 called of God to be a lawyer, or can largely glorify 
 
 
 
 

 OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 God in that profession. Far from it; but I be- 
 lieve that my calling to the law was strictly human, 
 and that many another lawyer ought to have been 
 in the ministry. 
 
 "This has been a long speech, friends; but it 
 had to be made. May God forgive me my broken 
 vow! I pray you to forgive me my cumbering of 
 the ground as elder, and my worldly example." 
 
 So saying, he dropped his pledge into the treasury 
 and took his seat. 
 
 
 
 
NO one looked at clock or watch; it was evi- 
 dent that all waited for further manifes- 
 tations of the presence and power of the 
 living Christ. To the surprise of everyone, the 
 next person to rise was the pastor's wife. Not 
 often had her voice been heard in general meet- 
 ings. Quiet, unassuming, she had been, never- 
 theless, a power in the congregation. 
 
 "My husband," she said, "has taken to himself 
 all the blame for changed plans in our life; but I 
 want to tell you that I think he would have been in 
 China to-day had it not been for me. My father 
 and mother believed in foreign missions, just as a 
 great many others do — for other people than their 
 own sons and daughters. They both contributed 
 to missions and kept themselves 'informed on the 
 subject; but my first suggestion of going myself 
 as a missionary was met with amazement, almost 
 amounting to indignation, and with stern refusal 
 to listen to such a proposition. My father said: 
 " 'Why, my dear daughter, you are not fitted for 
 that sort of life; that is for those who are endowed 
 with unusual powers of endurance, and especially 
 for those who have not such home ties as you have. 
 We could never be easy about you for a moment, 
 and it would shorten our lives by many years if 
 you should go to China. We can never give our 
 

 52 OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 consent to your marriage with John Stanton if it 
 involves such a separation. He may be meant for 
 a missionary, though we think he is really more 
 needed here; but you certainly were not meant for 
 a missionary's wife.' 
 
 ".In vain I pleaded that the wife's home should 
 be where her husband felt called to go; that I had 
 scarcely had a sick day in my life; that my par- 
 ents were in no real sense dependent on me, having 
 several other children equally ready and able to 
 care for them; that I was freer than nine out of ten 
 to go and quite as able to endure hardness as nine 
 out. of ten on the field. My parents' minds were 
 set like a flint against the idea; and I could not 
 move them. When it came to my decision, I 
 simply could not bear to go against their will in 
 this matter, so I persuaded my affianced husband 
 to accept the call offered him in this country, as 
 Providence seemed to stand in the way of our 
 going to China. 
 
 "My father, a noble Christian man in other 
 respects, is still living, and will, I presume, still be 
 bitterly opposed to our going; but as I see the 
 matter to-day, I am very certain that, when it is 
 simply a question of sentiment with parents, and 
 not one of actual dependence, the duty to Jesus 
 Christ should stand first. It seems to me that 
 otherwise one is simply loving father and mother 
 more than Jesus Christ, and is so far unworthy to 
 be called his disciple. I know there are many who 
 do not like to hear that doctrine preached; but 
 
 
 
 
OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 53 
 
 what did Jesus mean, if he did not mean that? 
 I have many times heard people try to answer that 
 question; I have tried all these years to answer it 
 myself; and the answers have all been unsatisfying. 
 I have loved father and mother more than him, and 
 have not been worthy of him. And does it not 
 strike you as queer that Christian fathers and 
 mothers are willing to have their sons and daughters 
 go to distant lands for diplomatic careers, or to 
 make fortunes, or even to marry some foreigner of 
 rank or family, while they see absolutely insur- 
 mountable obstacles in the way of their becoming 
 foreign ambassadors for Christ? Excuse me, 
 friends, if I get warmed up on this subject, or seem 
 to speak disrespectfully of my dear parents; but I 
 have been debating it so unhappily for years, con- 
 victed but not converted, that now, when the 
 conversion has swept through me like a flood, I 
 can see all the inconsistencies of the old position, 
 and shall pray for power to convince my father 
 that I do not love him less because I love my 
 Saviour more. I am ready to go with my husband 
 wherever and whenever the Lord may call him. 
 It would be a joy to remain here with you, who have 
 become a part of our lives; but it will also be a joy 
 to take the gospel to those who sit in darkness." 
 She resumed her seat, and the pastor spoke: 
 " These words from Mrs. Stanton's heart will 
 have their own power with you, I am sure; but, 
 in her desire to be honorable, she has taken too 
 much blame to herself. Had I not been wavering 
 
 

 54 
 
 OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 
 in my own mind over the question of staying at 
 home, I should have done far more than I ever 
 attempted to do to persuade her to go, knowing well 
 that her parents were not, in any real sense, de- 
 pendent on her. I was all too ready to accept her 
 parents' opposition as a providential hindrance. 
 
 "We have already passed the usual hour for 
 closing our service, friends; but I can see that you 
 do not wish to stop here. Let us take a little time 
 longer to hear what the Lord has been saying to our 
 hearts to-day; and then, if there is still more to be 
 said, as I imagine there will be, we can adjourn 
 until Wednesday evening. Have any of our dea- 
 cons a message for us?" 
 
 The portly form of Deacon Ransom rose from 
 the middle of the house and came forward. 
 
 "I believe," he said, "the office of deacon was 
 originally the serving of tables, that other people 
 might eat, and run to their preaching or their 
 teaching; and I've been wondering to-day if 
 the deacons hadn't gotten so absorbed in the 
 business of table-waiting that they have given up 
 the work of teaching and preaching for good and 
 all, and have forgotten the records about Stephen 
 and Philip, who seemed to be so full of the Holy 
 Spirit that they had to serve a dish of gospel with 
 every sandwich, and put in all their time between 
 meals doing the evangelistic jobs that the apostles 
 didn't get around to. Just think of the work that 
 Deacon Philip did up there in Samaria — foreign 
 missionary work before the church had learned that 
 
m 
 
 
 s 
 
 VJ 
 
 OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 foreign missions was its business! Just as like 
 as not the apostles would have felt a bit uncertain 
 about the wisdom of casting their pearls before those 
 despised Samaritans, in spite of all the Lord has 
 said about their giving points to the Jews; but 
 Deacon Philip, he hadn't any finicky notions. 
 Got driven out of Jerusalem by persecution, and 
 had to flee to Samaria, where they hadn't any need 
 for deacons just then, not having reached the table- 
 serving stage. But they needed the gospel about 
 as bad as anyone could, and there were no apostles 
 round to give it to them; and he felt that if the 
 deacons didn't turn foreign missionaries, there was 
 a great lot of those poor, ignorant people who were 
 going to die in their sins. It didn't seem much in 
 his line at first; but there was a big hole there, and 
 he had the stuff to fill it ; so he simply dropped the 
 tables and the widows and the orphans that he 
 couldn't serve just then, and went to serving the 
 souls that he could. And he proved such a mighty 
 good soul-server that when the Holy Spirit wanted 
 a special commissioner to get the gospel planted in 
 Africa, he just called Philip aside and made him 
 an apostle to that influential Ethiopian eunuch. 
 I tell you, my friends, I'm not another Philip, but 
 I'm magnifying my office since I saw my Lord 
 this morning. I'm too old to be sent as a mis- 
 sionary to Africa or China, or any other foreign 
 land; but I'm not going to let myself be so taken 
 up with looking after the temporalities of the church 
 here in Jaconsett that I can't carry the gospel 
 
 55 
 
 
 A 
 
56 OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 myself to all within reach, or send others to carry 
 it to those out of my reach. I'm not a rich 
 man, but I'm going to support at least a single 
 apostle to the heathen as long as God gives me 
 the means." 
 
 The rough and ready speech of the good deacon 
 was a bit of a relief to the intensity of what had 
 preceded, while indicating an equally common- 
 sense application of the day's thought. 
 
 The pastor was meditating an adjournment to 
 Wednesday evening, when an evidently very much 
 agitated young man, the son of Elder Austin, arose 
 and came forward. 
 
 "My pastor and friends," he said, "perhaps it 
 is not my turn to speak yet, for there are older 
 deacons and men older than I to be heard; but I 
 feel that I must free my mind of a very great bur- 
 den before this meeting closes. My father saw at 
 once his portrait in the story of our pastor's vision. 
 Strange to say, I had not seen mine at all until my 
 father spoke this evening. But it was there as 
 plain as day, and it was not the work of our pastor, 
 but of the Spirit of God; that I verily believe. I 
 was interested this morning, but the vision did 
 not take a very strong hold upon me, chiefly, per- 
 haps, for the reason that I have grown up to despise 
 everything of the nature of superstition, and have 
 not believed that, in our day, one hundred dreams 
 of the night are worth one hour's wide-awake medi- 
 tation of the day. I came here to-night expecting 
 to hear some of the more emotional or nervous 
 
 
 
OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 57 
 
 
 
 people narrate other visions, or make some extrava- 
 gant resolutions which would not be kept for a 
 month; and really anticipated more amusement 
 than anything else from the meeting. And this 
 in spite of the profound respect which I feel for 
 our sincere and most useful pastor. 
 
 "But the awakening has come. As one after 
 another of our honored elders, our pastor's wife 
 and Deacon Ransom, have spoken with the earnest- 
 ness of deep conviction, of the mistakes of the past 
 and the new resolves for the future, at once put into 
 execution, the feeling has grown stronger and 
 stronger within me that I have been facing life in 
 an altogether wrong spirit. I have called myself 
 a Christian ; but Christ has occupied by no means 
 the first place in my life. If I could do something 
 for him without taking too much time from things 
 more important (as I unwittingly accounted them), 
 or more agreeable, without sacrificing too much of 
 the culture and position which have been my aim, 
 I have done it, and taken credit to myself for every- 
 thing of the kind, as if it were conferring a favor on 
 my Lord. How hollow it all seems now! What 
 a travesty on a profession of religion! If I had 
 died to-day, it is possible that I might have been 
 saved in the goodness and mercy of God; but it 
 would have been 'so as through fire,' and I should 
 have gone empty-handed to the presence of him 
 who gave himself for me. It is amazing how in- 
 tensely, absolutely selfish a man can be, and remain 
 totally ignorant of it, considering himself filled with 
 
 

 58 OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 noble ambitions and devoted to the reformation of 
 the world. Many of you know to what I have 
 been looking forward, — to the same kind of career 
 as that in which Elder Ogden has made so distin- 
 guished, yet apparently so unsatisfying a success, — 
 backed up by the same sort of nattering friends 
 that backed him up. I was going to add one more 
 to the long list of lawyers, when the world would 
 get along quite as well if the present number were 
 reduced by three fourths, as I have been told by 
 men prominent in the profession. Not that the 
 law is not a good profession: a thoroughly good 
 Christian lawyer may do a great deal of good; but 
 there is a fierce competition among them, and a 
 consequent temptation to gradually drop out the 
 'thoroughly' and the 'good,' if not also the 'Chris- 
 tian,' in the race for the prizes of the profession, or 
 even for a self-supporting practice. 
 
 "Another thing that has struck me to-day is 
 that thought which I have pondered over and over. 
 Is it indeed true that the large majority of those who 
 go as missionaries are the children of the compara- 
 tively poor; while those who have been brought 
 up in comfort, and have now the means of support- 
 ing themselves independently of their professions, 
 rarely feel themselves called to take up this work ? 
 If it be true, — and the more I consider it, the more 
 I fear it is true, — is there any possible excuse for 
 it? Any relieving feature of the situation which 
 can prevent our shame and disgrace at the judg- 
 ment seat of Christ ? Have we been so pampered 
 
OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 
 59 
 
 \V> 
 
 and indulged that it has enervated our manhood, 
 and made us incapable of self-denial, of enduring 
 hardship ? Or have we in reality rather despised 
 the name of missionary as one fitted for the man 
 who cannot hope for anything higher, who cannot 
 command the world's admiration by reason of his 
 social position or the superior culture acquired 
 through unlimited means ? I confess, friends, that 
 the longer I look at it, the worse it seems, to think 
 that the churches and our Master have to look to 
 the men of small means, and very largely to the 
 graduates of our smaller colleges, and particularly 
 those in the west, for the supply of ambassadors 
 for Christ to foreign lands. It is a condition which 
 I have accepted without thought, as quite a matter 
 of course, until to-night it impresses itself upon me 
 as another piece of insufferable snobbishness, not 
 to call it by worse names; and I am heartily 
 ashamed of myself for permitting it to have any 
 part in my attitude toward this matter. 
 
 "Is it possible that I could for a moment regard 
 it as a waste of time and talents for me to follow 
 my Master in this work? As our pastor asked, 
 Who gave me the time and the strength and the 
 talents, and for what purpose ? The lawyers may 
 congratulate themselves on having one less competi- 
 tor for the fat fees and the political preferment. 
 I am going to Korea, where the people are begging 
 for more missionaries, or to China, where they are 
 not begging for them, but need them quite as badly, 
 to teach those people a higher, a purer, a better 
 
 
60 OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 law than any on our statute books, even the law 
 from which all the best that is in those books has 
 come. And my going shall never cost the church 
 one cent. The money with which God has blessed 
 me has indeed been in danger of cursing me; 
 but it shall be so no longer. I did not see Christ 
 this morning; but I have seen him this evening; 
 and life is a different thing." 
 
 No more impressive speech had been made than 
 that of this rich young man, who did not go away 
 sorrowful, although he had great possessions. 
 His father had blanched at the first suggestion of 
 the son's intention to turn aside from the family's 
 ambitious plans and give himself to mission work; 
 but that father had himself been too truly converted 
 to-day to utter or even think one protest; and the 
 willing sacrifice was laid on the altar, while Mr. 
 Stanton offered a word of closing prayer: 
 
 "O Master, we know thee better to-night than 
 we have ever known thee before, and we love thee 
 better. The vision of thee has so filled our eyes 
 and our minds and our hearts as to blot out and to 
 cast out a multitude of things which we have hither- 
 to regarded as precious, until we have come with 
 Paul to count them but dung that we may win 
 Christ and be found in him. This is thy holy 
 temple: here we have built our altar of sacrifice, 
 and upon it we have laid ourselves, our strength, 
 our talents, our time, our wealth, our poverty, all 
 that makes up our lives. Send down the fire, O 
 Lord, from heaven, and prove thine acceptance of 
 
 
OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 our offering and of us; and may that fire be purity 
 and strength and glory in our lives henceforth, as 
 we daily practice the presence of the living Christ, 
 and grow into the fullness of his likeness. In his 
 name, Amen." 
 
 At the close of this simple prayer, the pastor 
 suggested that, not for the sake of parade, but to 
 make the idea of offering to the present Lord as 
 real as possible, all who desired to present money 
 or pledges or service should come forward in orderly 
 manner and place their offerings in the treasury 
 now, reserving for another evening any further 
 narratives of experience or testimony as to new 
 convictions. There was scarcely one in the house, 
 even down to the smallest child, who did not gladly 
 respond ; and it required no counting of the con- 
 tents to assure pastor and people that the chest con- 
 tained many times as much as it had ever contained 
 before. After the benediction there was far more 
 animated conversation than there had been in the 
 morning; but through it all could readily be de- 
 tected a tone of earnestness and a tone of gladness 
 such as nothing but a new acquaintance with Jesus 
 Christ and with the realities of life could have 
 produced. It seemed to John Stanton as if he had 
 lived a year in a day; but he went home with a 
 light heart, and with less prospect of a "blue 
 Monday" than he had since the beginning of his 
 ministry. 
 
 " I never have admired or loved you as much as 
 I have to-day," said his wife, as they walked home 
 
 

 together. "You have not been, and I will not be, 
 disobedient to the heavenly vision." 
 
 "And the strangest thing about it," he replied, 
 "is that, after all our Lord said about his constant 
 presence, we should need to have such a vision to 
 make him real, and to make the duties and privi- 
 leges of life real!" 
 
OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 63 
 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 IT is hardly necessary to say that the chief topic 
 of conversation in the city of Jaconsett, for the 
 next three days, was the remarkable events of 
 the Sabbath in the Westminster Church, more 
 especially when it transpired, as the pastor had not 
 intended it should, that the annual offering of the 
 church to foreign missions, instead of being about 
 five hundred dollars, ranged well over ten thousand 
 dollars, without counting Elder Austin's proposed 
 endowment of the theological seminary; and that 
 the number of missionary volunteers from the con- 
 gregation could not be counted on the fingers of 
 two hands. Some were sincerely alarmed lest the 
 church should be impoverished, or various forms 
 of Christian work languish, through the drawing 
 off of so many Christian workers! The old cry 
 was raised : " Wherefore this waste ? Why wa£ not 
 this ointment sold for three hundred pence and 
 given to the poor here at home?" There were 
 indeed certain members of the Home Missionary 
 Society of Westminster Church who felt morally 
 certain that they would be unable to raise their 
 usual fifteen hundred dollars for that board, to 
 say nothing of the other boards. (It actually 
 turned out afterward that, without special effort, 
 simply as the result of the new realization of the 
 presence of Christ, the society raised five thousand 
 
64 OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 
 
 
 dollars, and every other board benefited in like 
 manner. Hundreds of the members of the church 
 had simply come to realize, what they had long 
 believed and indefinitely aspired to, that to them 
 to live was Christ, and so, as a matter of course, 
 all Christ's work was their work, and their money 
 was Christ's money. But this was only the after 
 out -working of the new spirit; and, as a matter of 
 fact, so far as the members of that church were 
 concerned, the new spirit had taken possession of 
 so large a majority of them that there was no 
 grumbling, no envy, no apprehensions of losses, 
 no slightest suggestion of waste.) 
 
 As to the members of other churches, and the 
 outside world, they were curious, skeptical, envious, 
 or apprehensive, as the case might be. Mr. Stan- 
 ton felt sorry for the prospects of the other pastors 
 on the Wednesday evening, as it required no 
 prophet to foresee that the prayer-meeting room at 
 Westminster would be altogether too small to hold 
 the people, who, from interest or curiosity, would 
 gather to see and hear any later developments of 
 the new idea in foreign missions. So he told the 
 sexton to open the main auditorium for the evening, 
 and, as he had anticipated, there gathered even a 
 larger company than on the Sabbath evening, 
 including not a few of the usual prayer-meeting 
 attendants at neighboring churches, who had felt 
 warranted by the startling character of the reports 
 which had come to them in absenting themselves 
 for once from their usual places of worship. 
 
 
 
 
 
OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 Indeed, one neighboring pastor, interested for him- 
 self and for his people, and anticipating very 
 small attendance at his own church, had posted a 
 notice that he and his people would attend the 
 service at Westminster, instead of holding their 
 own meeting. And so the church was as full as it 
 had ever been since its dedication. 
 
 After an opening hymn had been sung, and por- 
 tions of Second Corinthians, eighth and ninth 
 chapters, read, Mr. Stanton offered a prayer in the 
 simple, direct style which had already become 
 habitual with him in his new realization of Christ's 
 constant presence: 
 
 " Our heavenly Father, we owe thee everything, 
 and we have given thee very little. We have be- 
 longed to thee, and yet have counted our lives and 
 possessions as belonging to ourselves. Thou hast 
 sought to reveal thyself to us, and we have been 
 dull and obtuse, and have not seen thee. Thou 
 hast called us, and the din of earth's machinery, the 
 clang of the world's cymbals, have so filled our ears 
 that we have not heard thee. Thou hast tried to 
 guide us to thy glory and our own present and ever- 
 lasting happiness, and we have preferred the guid- 
 ance of our sin-biased senses. Thou hast sent 
 us into thy vineyard, and we have hung about the 
 gate, reluctant to bear the burden and heat of the 
 day, or waiting for special orders as to the place 
 where we shall work, while the overripe clusters 
 are dropping from the vines. Some of us have said 
 that we would go, yet we went not. Some of us 
 5 
 
 

 66 OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 have plainly refused to be sent, and honored our- 
 selves for our lack of hypocrisy. But now, O 
 Father, our eyes have seen thee, and we abhor our- 
 selves and repent in dust and ashes. Wilt thou 
 forgive us all the mistakes and the misunderstand- 
 ings of the past, and make such unhappy conditions 
 impossible for us in all the future by fuller and ever 
 fuller revelations of thyself, and, consequently, of 
 our own hearts, and of the claim of our fellow-men 
 upon us ? Thou didst greatly move our hearts on 
 the Sabbath night by the words of strong conviction 
 which came from the lips and hearts of brethren 
 honored among us for their works' sake, who had 
 yet been brought into the presence of new ideals, 
 and so possessed of new ambitions for themselves 
 and for thy kingdom. Grant, O Lord, that to- 
 night we may see yet more abundantly the outpour- 
 ing of thy grace in the power of thy Spirit. We 
 are here to present ourselves before thee that thou 
 mayest take us as we are and transform us into 
 vessels most meet for the Master's use and prepared 
 unto every good work. We would see Jesus, and 
 become unconscious of the presence of others. 
 In his name, Amen." 
 
 Then followed a brief, unembellished statement 
 of the events of the previous Sabbath, and an in- 
 vitation to all the members of the church and con- 
 gregation to express the thoughts which, having 
 proved profitable to them, might also prove profit- 
 able to the assembled company. He concluded: 
 
 "Most of us made our offerings on Sabbath 
 
OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 67 
 
 
 :*» 
 
 evening; but, that we may continue to realize as 
 far as possible that our Lord is sitting by the treas- 
 ury, watching us most lovingly and longingly, and 
 listening to every word we speak, I have left the 
 treasury in its former place, where it may also 
 serve for the reception of any belated offerings. 
 Who has a burden of regret or of joy which he will 
 permit us to share?" 
 
 "I have a burden of both, Mr. Stanton," re- 
 sponded a man of middle age, as he came forward 
 to the treasury. "I have been one of the chronic 
 objectors to every suggestion along the line of 
 foreign missions. I have made every one of those 
 already mentioned on Sunday, and at least a score 
 of others. And every one of them now appears to 
 me to have been nothing less than the old plea, 
 'I pray thee have me excused.' Not one of them 
 will hold water, yet I have repeated them so often 
 that they had come to appear to me as cold logic. 
 If one of them was answered for me, I could al- 
 ways take refuge in another, and after the dis- 
 cussion was over, those objections that had been 
 knocked out always lived to fight another day. 
 
 "There is that objection, 'It takes ninety-nine 
 cents to send one cent to the heathen.' I must 
 have known that it was at least an enormous exag- 
 geration, especially in view of the number of times 
 I had heard it authoritatively contradicted; yet I 
 repeated it on numerous occasions. These last 
 three days I have been looking the matter up, and 
 have discovered that, instead of ninetv-nine cents 
 
c -!S 
 
 OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 
 to send one cent, it actually takes but five to seven 
 cents to send a whole dollar, and that there is no 
 other business in the world, equally extended and 
 many-phased, administered in anything like so 
 economical a manner. 
 
 "That is just a sample of the absolute perver- 
 sion, the wicked distortion, of facts, of which self- 
 excusers like myself are daily guilty. Think of- 
 that other objection, which I have rolled as a sweet 
 morsel under my tongue, 'It is a great waste of 
 funds, and the church and the country cannot af- 
 ford it.' My friends, I came across a statement to- 
 day, backed up by statistics, which fairly made my 
 hair stand on end. It was this: ' Out of every one 
 thousand dollars spent in this country, two hundred 
 and fifty dollars go for food, two hundred and 
 eighteen dollars for clothing, five hundred dollars, 
 for intoxicating liquors and tobacco, thirty dollars 
 for other purposes, and two dollars for foreign 
 missions.' The man who first sees that statement 
 will be disposed to question its truth; but there is 
 abundant evidence for it. Talk about your waste! 
 Five hundred dollars for poison and smoke, and 
 two dollars to send the gospel to millions of heathen! 
 I tell you, friends, it broke me all up; for, while I 
 have not spent my money in just that way, I found, 
 when I went to figuring, that the percentage that I 
 had spent on my own ease and comfort and pleasure 
 and luxury, and the percentage that went to foreign 
 missions were relatively not very far from those 
 figures. It made me feel as if I should like to 
 
 

 TFB 
 
 
 OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 69 
 
 
 
 reverse the figures for a few years to come; and I 
 wanted to hunt up every man on whom I had ever 
 used that argument and get him to kick me, I felt 
 so mean. 
 
 "Did you ever think why the Chinese and the 
 Africans are still worshiping their idols? It has 
 just come over me that it is simply because we are 
 still worshiping ours; that's all. They call theirs 
 Buddha or Pusa, or something or other, while 
 ours is the ' almighty dollar,' or the good things that 
 dollar will buy. There is a good deal of difference 
 in appearance between their idols and ours, but 
 they don't begin to squander the time and the 
 heart on theirs that we do on ours. I know it 
 must seem strange to you to hear me talking in this 
 way, — rather like Saul among the prophets; but 
 it's just come over me like a flood, and I'm not the 
 same man I was last week. 
 
 "Then there's that awful lie about sending sp 
 many missionaries abroad that there wouldn't 
 be anybody left to preach the gospel in America. 
 I've looked that up too, and I've discovered that 
 one twentieth of the people in the world now have 
 nineteen twentieths of the ministers and Christian 
 workers to look after them, while the other nine- 
 teen twentieths of the world have one twentieth of 
 these workers; that even now only one in twenty of 
 our theological graduates is going abroad, and that 
 there are more Methodist ministers in the one city 
 of Chicago than there are in the whole empire of 
 China. And all the time there isn't a man, woman 
 
70 OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 or child in America who has not heard, or cannot 
 readily hear, the gospel of Jesus Christ, while 
 more than half the population of China have never 
 heard it at all. 
 
 "I've no doubt that some of you have heard me 
 say also that the task is absolutely hopeless, so 
 there is no use attempting it. I suspect my partners 
 think I haven't been giving very close attention to 
 business since Sunday; but I've had more im- 
 portant business than selling groceries these days, 
 and that was getting right with God. So I have 
 been studying up this matter too, and I find that, 
 in spite of the way the church has been merely 
 playing at missions, putting the pennies and the 
 nickels into that and the dollars and the eagles into 
 everything else, the work has been blest most 
 wonderfully, so that there is not a mission field on 
 which the proportion of Christians is not increasing 
 more rapidly than the population, while there are 
 many fields in China, Korea, India, the Philippines, 
 and elsewhere, in which whole communities have 
 become Christian; and like the Fiji and Sandwich 
 Islands, which have quite ceased to be heathen. 
 Great movements are on foot in many of these lands 
 which indicate yet more wonderful results in years 
 soon to come. These are critical times in many 
 lands, and ten dollars now may accomplish what 
 nine hundred dollars will not do ten years hence. 
 
 "I just want to mention one more of my old 
 stock objections, and then this long speech is 
 ended, and I sit down. I don't know how many 
 
 
OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 71 
 
 times I have said it was of no use to send mission- 
 aries to the heathen because you couldn't possibly 
 make a good Christian out of a pagan; they were 
 all rice-Christians, and the more rice the more 
 Christian. That also was a lie, for if ever the rice 
 was taken away from a man pretty effectually, it 
 was during that Boxer outbreak out there in China. 
 Yet hundreds of those Christians, without rice, 
 without clothing, without shelter, without friends, 
 without mercy, stood faithful unto death, when a 
 few words, or a simple act of idolatrous worship, 
 would have secured life and mercy and friends and 
 clothing and food — with God's displeasure. Na- 
 tive Christians in other lands have endured similar 
 trials of faith in like fashion. I tell you it makes me 
 ashamed when I think how I have failed to lend a 
 hand to help them, and to make more Christians 
 like them. I wish we had more of that kind of 
 pagans here in America. 
 
 " Brethren, I've done. I put into that treasury 
 on Sundav night a hundred times what I've ever 
 given before; but I've learned something since 
 then, so I am going to double it to-night, and may 
 God help Ralph Jackson henceforth to live up to 
 the light that he has as well as many of those con- 
 verted heathen are doing it." 
 
 It was a most excellent beginning, and no one 
 felt regret that Mr. Jackson had used so much time. 
 His speech started Mr. James Waterson to his 
 feet, a man of about the same age, president of one 
 of the banks of Jaconsett. 
 
 

 mmmt Y 
 
 OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 "Speaking of objections," he began, "that has 
 been my chief relation to the cause of foreign mis- 
 sions until a few months ago; and one of my favor- 
 ite objections has been that the present policy of 
 the boards is all wrong in two particulars. First, 
 they support the missionaries in altogether too 
 comfortable a style; and, second, they do not ex- 
 ercise sufficient faith in their plans and work. I 
 have always argued, with regard to the first point, 
 that the missionary who goes to Africa should live 
 as the Africans do, and the one who goes to China 
 as the Chinese do, both for purposes of economy, 
 and that thus the natives may easily be won from 
 their own level. 
 
 "Well, as you know, I got interested in that new 
 men's movement, when I was urged very hard by 
 friends to visit the foreign missions. As I badly 
 needed a change, and had planned some day to 
 make the grand tour, I scraped together my savings 
 and went along. That trip opened my eyes to a 
 lot of things. At first glance it did seem, in some 
 places, as if the missionaries of some churches were 
 living in a greater degree of comfort than was abso- 
 lutely necessary, or advantageous to the work; but 
 when one came to study their surroundings, and 
 see the manner of the native living, several things 
 were revealed. In the first place, the proposition 
 that the missionary should live like the ordinary 
 native was relegated at once to the region of im- 
 possibilities. The experiment has been tried more 
 than once, and invariably with one or another 
 
 

 OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 
 73 
 
 
 of three results — the missionary either died young, 
 was invalided home, perhaps to die there, or found 
 that, with his utmost endeavor, he could not make 
 himself a native, and had to spend at least three 
 or four times the native salary to keep in any meas- 
 ure of health and attain any measure of efficiency. 
 This last outcome at once introduced the whole 
 difficulty of native envy and criticism which the 
 foreign style of living was said to produce, with this 
 further complication, that the native naturally ex- 
 pects the foreign style of living to cost more than 
 his own, and expects the foreigner to live as he 
 would at home, but does not see any good reason 
 why the foreigner who lives like the native should 
 not do it on the same expenditure, and consequently 
 suspects him of unwillingness to practice self- 
 denial. On the other hand, in view of the require- 
 ments of the climate in most mission fields, in 
 view of the large amount of entertaining, both of 
 foreigners and natives, which must be done, and 
 in view of the comparative cheapness and in- 
 efficiency of the native servants engaged, I came to 
 the conclusion that most of the missionaries and 
 their boards were doing neither an extravagant nor 
 an inexpedient thing in making the standard of 
 living abroad about what it would be if the mis- 
 sionaries were in charge of moderate sized churches 
 at home. Moreover, I think it is high time that we 
 quit thinking that because a man gives up nearly 
 everything of this life to go as a foreign missionary, 
 he should therefore be either required or expected 
 
74 
 
 
 OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 TS3£> 
 
 
 
 to give up everything else when he gets there, while 
 the man who stays in America is, by that fact, ex- 
 cused from giving up anything. In the midst of 
 that heathen darkness and vileness and supersti- 
 tion, if anywhere in this wide world, a man would 
 be excusable for surrounding himself with a little 
 of that atmosphere of home comfort and refinement 
 which are so common with us. I have noticed 
 that it always makes a vast difference in a man's 
 ideas on this subject when one of his own family, or 
 a personal friend, goes to the foreign field. 
 
 "As to the faith problem, is there any more 
 reason that one board should commission its men 
 and women and send them forth among the heathen 
 with no assurance of an income, than that another 
 board should do the same thing in America? or 
 why the board should be expected to take a stand 
 which the church it represents, and to which it is 
 subject, will not take? It happens that I have run 
 across, in my journeyings, some of the operations 
 of that theory. I knew of one case where a self- 
 styled 'faith missionary,' who was quite in the 
 habit of looking down upon and criticising those 
 who had fixed incomes, because they were trusting 
 to men and not to God, ran out of funds and out 
 of health at the same time. For the sake of her 
 own health and that of a child she was compelled 
 to go to a seaside resort, although she had often 
 severely criticised others for spending time there; 
 was provided there with a house, food and care by 
 missionaries with fixed incomes, and then thanked 
 
 
T51 
 
 OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 75 
 
 the Lord that the principle of faith had triumphed 
 and the Lord had provided for her in answer to 
 prayer! And I knew of another family who re- 
 ceived no remittance from their faith mission for 
 many months. Food and clothing were exhausted, 
 funds were absolutely lacking; they ran up long 
 accounts with the trustful heathen dealers in food 
 supplies, and at length, in imminent clanger of 
 starving, managed to borrow enough money from 
 the natives to get them to the port, where they threw 
 themselves on the bounty of more definitely pro- 
 vided-for missionaries. 
 
 "I am not decrying faith, but simply the sort of 
 faith wmich divorces itself from sound judgment, 
 and tempts the Lord by going ahead of him. That 
 the church at home is holding the boards and the 
 missionaries and the kingdom of God back by a 
 great lack of true faith, I firmly believe; but we 
 are not going to throw the blame on the board and 
 the missionaries, and be blameless. 
 
 " So you see, friends, that a trip around the world, 
 seeing things as they actually are, is quite apt to 
 puncture the objections which have been inflated 
 by frequent blowing to such enormous proportions 
 that they stop the entrance to God's treasury, and 
 clog our own hearts to the entrance of his blessing 
 at the same time. I thank God that he has opened 
 my eyes to see things as they are; but I don't intend 
 to take the expenses of my eye-opening operations 
 out of my contributions to foreign missions. The 
 new movement aims at a fivefold increase as 
 
 

 OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 speedily as possible. Some will not do half that, I 
 fear, so I mean to make mine tenfold as long as 
 the Lord prospers me. It is all his anyway, and I 
 am sure that he wants that much for his work." 
 
1w 
 
 OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 77 
 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 i i A S long as we are on the subject of excuses, 
 /A perhaps I might venture a word with re- 
 gard to another sort," came, in a strong, 
 clear voice, from the rear of the church. A young 
 man in the early twenties came briskly forward. He 
 was a son of the church, a senior in the theological 
 seminary. He was at home for a few days before 
 his graduation. " I can never be sufficiently thank- 
 ful that I was at home just at this time, for I feel 
 that the experiences of these few days will make 
 all the difference in my life between success and 
 defeat. I had considered myself well intrenched 
 against all arguments on the subject. We have 
 had numerous missionaries and student volunteer 
 secretaries at the seminary ; and I have either man- 
 aged to steer clear of them all, or, if cornered, have 
 glibly poured out one reason after another why I 
 should not go to the foreign field. When I came 
 home the other day, there was nothing farther 
 from my thoughts than going as a missionary, 
 either foreign or home; but now I have no inten- 
 tion of staying in this country if God permits me 
 to go. The explanation of this radical change is 
 simply that every one of those 'reasons' for staying 
 at home stood out clearly marked 'excuse' when I 
 could see Christ sitting over against the treasury. 
 Not one of them could be presented to him with 
 
 
 
 
 
c 
 
 78 
 
 OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 any hope of acceptance; and I had finally to throw 
 them all overboard, and tell him that if he wants 
 me I am ready to go. 
 
 "I had to go farther than that, however, for just 
 there lay one of my most persistent excuses, the 
 last to be got rid of — the excuse of the lack of a 
 special call. In this, I am sorry to say, I had been 
 strongly supported by one of our seminary profes- 
 sors, who felt very strongly on the subject of the 
 special call to the ministry, and the special call to 
 a particular portion of the field. Some of the 
 students have urged him to define it, and his reply 
 is, 'Being purely spiritual, it is very hard to de- 
 fine; but when it comes you will recognize it as 
 being different from anything else.' Asked if it 
 were an audible voice, he replied: 'No: it is not 
 audible to the ear of the flesh, but to the ear of the 
 soul. It is a conviction, not based upon reasoning, 
 but directly from the Spirit, that you are to go to a 
 certain work in a certain place.' This sort of in- 
 definiteness just suited most of us, for, if we left 
 our reason out of the account, we had very little 
 difficulty in persuading ourselves that a definitely 
 written, signed and labeled 'call' from an American 
 church, at twelve hundred to three thousand dol- 
 lars a year, was much more positive than an in- 
 definite appeal from the Board of Foreign Mis- 
 sions to go somewhere in the foreign field at one 
 thousand dollars per year; and the larger the church, 
 the louder the call. 
 
 "Strange to say, we did not carry this latter 
 
 
OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 79 
 
 --^ 
 
 logic any farther, and compare the field of a million 
 heathen with the home field of a thousand or two 
 nominal Christians. Indeed, according to our 
 professor, the question of relative need should 
 hardly be considered, for the question of a call 
 was one not for the judgment but for the emotions. 
 And I was very certain that none of my feelings 
 drew me to India or Africa. 
 
 "Ah, friends, the matter looks very different to 
 me now, and especially since I came across a 
 foreign mission parable in a paper to-day. It is 
 not very long, and, with your permission, I will 
 read it. It is entitled: 
 
 
 "As It Was Not in the Days of Jesus Christ 
 " 'And they went away in the boat to a desert place apart. 
 And the people saw them going, and many knew them, 
 and they ran together there on foot from all the cities, and 
 outwent them. And he came forth and saw a great multi- 
 tude, and he had compassion on them, because they were 
 as sheep not having a shepherd: and he began to teach 
 them many things. And when the day was now far spent, 
 his disciples came unto him, and said, The place is desert, 
 and the day is now far spent; send them away, that they 
 may go into the country and villages round about, and buy 
 themselves somewhat to eat. But he answered and said 
 unto them, Give ye them to eat. And they say unto him, 
 Shall we go and buy two hundred shillings' worth of 
 bread, and give them to eat? And he saith unto them, 
 How many loaves have ye? go and see. And when 
 they knew, they say, Five, and two fishes. And he com- 
 manded them that all should sit down by companies upon 
 the green grass. And they sat down in ranks, by hundreds, 
 and by fifties. And he took the five loaves and the two 
 

 
 
 OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 fishes, and looking up to heaven, he blessed, and brake 
 the loaves; and he gave to the disciples to set before them; 
 and the two fishes divided he among them all.' 
 
 "Now when the disciples had received the bread and 
 the fishes, they first sat down upon the green grass and ate 
 and were filled. While they were so doing, they began to 
 say among themselves, 'If a man provide not first for his 
 own, he is worse than a heathen and a publican. Where- 
 fore, let us first look about for baskets, wherein we may 
 store some of this food, lest, to-morrow and the day after, 
 we and the Master may lack bread, and know not where 
 to look for that which is needful to sustain and cheer us.' 
 So all the disciples, save John, the brother of James, sought 
 them out baskets, and filled twelve of them to overflowing 
 with the bread and fishes which Jesus had broken, while 
 John set off alone to give the hungry multitudes to eat. 
 
 "And it came to pass that when the eleven disciples had 
 filled the baskets and set them aside, they said again one 
 to another, 'It were great shame not to make use of this 
 abundance, while it is in our hands, to provide still further 
 against the future of our so uncertain lives. Yonder 
 market has not yet closed for the day, and this food will 
 bring good money on the market, which will serve for 
 capital wherewith to carry on our work and provide for 
 our families as well. He who liveth only in the present, 
 and taketh no thought for the future, doeth foolishly. 
 Let us put our Lord's pound into the hands of the banker, 
 that in the future he may receive his own with usury.' 
 
 "It therefore seemed good unto them to separate seven 
 of their number unto the work of carrying other baskets 
 full of the bread and fishes (what a pity that it had been 
 broken !) to the neighboring market town, where it found a 
 ready sale, and the silver, the price thereof, gave forth a 
 pleasant sound as it fell into the bag of Judas Iscariot 
 (who also betrayed Him). 
 
 "Now after that the seven had departed, three of the 
 other disciples joined themselves to John in carrying 
 
 
the bread and fishes to the hungry multitudes. And it 
 came to pass that, because the first five hundred of these 
 people were near at hand, they gave first to them; and 
 because they were old neighbors from among the fisher 
 folk near Bethsaida of Galilee, they went back and forth, 
 back and forth among them, to make sure that all were 
 filled to the full, and that none failed to comprehend 
 accurately the details of the chemical processes involved 
 in the mastication and digestion of food. But when John 
 saw how great was the multitude, and how few were the 
 laborers, his heart, like the Master's, was moved with 
 compassion toward them, and, when next he returned to 
 the Master for a supply of the food, he said, 'Master, shall 
 I not go to the multitudes beyond? Surely thou didst 
 break the bread for them also! But what am I among so 
 many? Canst not thou thrust forth more laborers into 
 this work?' And the Master made answer, 'My disciple, 
 thou hast judged rightly my purpose. I have sent you 
 twelve unto the whole multitude; and thou alone hast 
 comprehended my meaning. The others have, in whole 
 or in part, failed to heed the thrusting which I have given 
 them. Go, meet the greatest need, and thou shalt do well.' 
 "Now as John turned away to hasten with bread to 
 the hungry, he findeth Peter standing there, his arms 
 filled with bread and fishes, but looking uncertainly this 
 way and that. And when he saw him he cried out, ' Simon, 
 what aileth thee, the energetic and impetuous? Dost 
 thou not see yonder multitude to whom no man is minis- 
 tering? Bring thy load of food and come with me.' 
 Simon Peter answered, saying, 'The Master hath not given 
 me special instructions as to whither I should go; and I 
 dare not leave these .five hundred old neighbors without a 
 special call.' Now Jesus overheard the words of the two 
 disciples, and he turned him about and looked upon Peter 
 with grief and indignation in his face and in his voice, as 
 he said, 'O thou foolish disciple! Hath not thy Father in 
 heaven given thee eyes to see, and ears to hear, a mind to 
 
82 OVER AGAINST THE TREASUR 
 
 
 think and a heart to feel? Lift up thine eyes and look! 
 Canst thou not see the thousands still hungry and unfed? 
 Canst thou not see many of them wandering away, fainting 
 and in despair, perhaps to fall by the wayside, while others 
 are pulling and eating the grass about them in a vain 
 attempt to satisfy their hunger? Open thine ears and 
 listen! Canst thou not hear their despairing cry, "Come 
 over and help us?" Exercise they mind! Canst thou not 
 decide where the bread and the fishes in thy hand are the 
 most keenly needed and will do the most good? Enlarge 
 thy heart, that this need may appeal to thee as it appeals to 
 thy Master; and ask me not for a special call. Have I 
 not said unto you, "Give ye them to eat?" Trouble not 
 thyself about the sufficiency of the supply for present or 
 for future needs. Cannot he who has broken the bread 
 unto you once, break it again if there be need?' And 
 Simon Peter asked no longer for what had already been 
 given him, the special call of a special need. 
 
 "Now it came to pass that night came on before the 
 seven disciples could return from the market town, whither 
 they had gone to sell the bread and the fishes. And there 
 were those who had looked with covetous eyes upon the 
 silver which they had received; and there followed them 
 from the market ten men of the baser sort well armed 
 with clubs, who fell upon them in the darkness, wounded 
 them sore, and took from them not only what they had 
 gained, but also the scanty hoard which Judas had afore- 
 time carried in the bag. 
 
 "As the disciples crawled along the road to find the 
 Master, they heard the moans of one and another of the 
 five thousand who had been left unfed, and had wandered 
 off into the night. Humiliated and sore, they rested on 
 the mountain side that night, and awoke the next morning 
 still weary and again hungry. Most eagerly did they 
 uncover the twelve baskets of food so prudently reserved; 
 but to their confusion and dismay the food had all bred 
 worms and stank. 'Said I not unto you,' spake Jesus, 
 
 J 
 
 3 
 
OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 83 
 
 
 "Seek ye first his kingdom, and his righteousness; and 
 all these things shall be added unto you? Lay not up 
 for yourselves treasures upon the earth, where moth and 
 rust doth consume, and where thieves break through and 
 steal : but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where 
 neither moth nor rust doth consume, and where thieves do 
 not break through nor steal. There is that scattereth, 
 and increaseth yet more ; and there is that withholdeth 
 more than is meet, but it tendeth only to want.'"" 
 
 When he had finished reading, the student con- 
 tinued: "It now seems to me as plain as day that 
 the man who will not use the brains God has given 
 him, and the word of God in the Scriptures, has 
 no right whatever to expect that God will give 
 him the special guidance of the Holy Spirit in the 
 determination of practical questions of life work. 
 While God certainly does help those who cannot 
 help themselves, I am sure there is no promise that 
 he will help those who will not help themselves; 
 and I don't see any more reason why a young 
 student of theology should wait for a mysterious 
 supernatural voice to direct his choice of a field 
 than to direct his choice of a seminary or a book or 
 a typewriter. Let him exercise to the full the 
 powers of judgment which God has given him, all 
 the time asking God to direct, or, if need be, over- 
 rule, that judgment, and I believe he will know 
 ten times more infallibly than by waiting for the 
 mysterious voice. I still believe with all my heart 
 in the 'still small voice,' but I don't believe it was 
 ever intended to supplant sanctified common 
 sense and judgment. The very man who insists 
 
 \\ 
 
OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 upon it with reference to the foreign call never 
 thinks of waiting for it to decide between two home 
 churches which have called him at the same time. 
 He sits down and studies the two calls, considers 
 the size and condition of the churches and the 
 manses, the salaries, the length of vacations, and 
 above all, — to put it charitably, — the size of the 
 fields and their relative needs; and, with prayer for 
 guidance, he lets his judgment decide. 
 
 "But I have talked long enough. The reason I 
 feel so strongly is because I have just been through 
 it all myself. And now, God willing, I am going 
 as a foreign missionary, called by the greatest of 
 all calls, the call of the greatest need to the man 
 who is free to go anywhere, while many others are 
 not." 
 
 "Will you hear just one more student from the 
 same school?" called another voice before the last 
 speaker had even resumed his seat. "Even my 
 classmate there did not know I was here, and I am 
 the last member of the class from whom he would 
 expect to hear the sort of testimony I am about to 
 give. He knows what a hobby I have made of the 
 study of comparative religions, and how strongly I 
 have urged that the various ethnic religions are 
 really only different forms of the worship of the 
 one true God, with blemishes, it is true, but each 
 one especially adapted to the genius of a particular 
 people, the evolution of their need, and to them 
 really the embodiment of the one eternal truth. I 
 have maintained that the followers of each religion, 
 
OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 in all the various forms of their worship, were true 
 seekers after God; and I have gone almost to the 
 length of the self-styled 'New Theology' in per- 
 suading myself that even men's sins and vices are 
 an endeavor to find God and fitly worship him. 
 In these things I went far beyond any of our pro- 
 fessors; partly, I now think, in my eager anxiety 
 to quench the 'still small voice' that has for years 
 been calling to me, 'Come over and help us! 
 Come over and help us!' 
 
 "Coming to town to-day, and hearing some con- 
 versation about the events of the past few days in 
 this church, I concluded to stay over and attend the 
 meeting to-night. As I wanted to surprise my 
 classmate, I did not go to his home, but stepped 
 into the Y. M. C. A. rooms. Running my eye 
 over the books in the library, I noticed 'Students 
 and the Modern Missionary Crusade,' the report 
 of the Nashville Convention of the Student Volun- 
 teer Movement. Such literature has not been very 
 familiar to me in the past, but I took the volume 
 aside and opened it at random. My eye fell upon 
 an address entitled 'The Non-Christian Religions 
 Inadequate to Meet the Needs of Men.' Could 
 it be that I was wrong ? The maker of that address 
 was not given, I knew, to speaking rashly; in 
 everything but the missionary question I had a 
 great admiration for him. If he was right, then I 
 was wrong. 
 
 "I started to read the address, and forgot every- 
 thing else. Fair, absolutely fair, magnanimous 
 
86 OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 in concession of everything that could be conceded, 
 yet he says: 
 
 "The modern, tolerant, easy-going attitude of some 
 students of comparative religion is not the attitude of the 
 Hebrew prophets, nor of the apostles of Jesus Christ. 
 They never saw in the idolatry of man any upward moving 
 of men's hearts toward a purer faith. They denounced 
 that idolatry as puerile, as ignominious, as false, as sinful. 
 * * * Of course there is good and truth in the non- 
 Christian religions. It is that good and truth that is in 
 them that has enabled them to survive, that gives them 
 their great power; but there is no great truth in the non- 
 Christian religions which is not found in a purer and richer 
 form in the Christian religion. In Christianity each truth 
 is balanced by its just corrective. Hindooism teaches that 
 God is near, but forgets that he is holy; Mohammedanism 
 teaches that God is great, but forgets that he is loving; 
 Buddhism teaches that this earthly life is fleeting, but 
 forgets that we must therefore work the works of God 
 before the night comes; Confucianism teaches that we live 
 in the midst of a great framework of human relationships, 
 but forgets that in the midst of all these we have a living 
 help and a personal fellowship with the eternal God, in 
 whose lasting presence is our home. And the setting in 
 which these truths are found in the non-Christian religions 
 makes them often not a help but a positive hindrance to 
 men. It is often harder to convince of error the man with 
 the half truth than the man with nothing but demonstrable 
 
 And the speaker proceeded to illustrate the 
 further fact that these non-Christian religions are 
 seamed through and through with great and posi- 
 tive and hideous evils, imbedded in the religions 
 and deriving their most terrible power from the 
 
 
OF£i? AGAINST THE TREASURY 87 
 
 * 
 
 religious sanctions by which they are surrounded, 
 by reference to the positive immorality of Hindooism, 
 the sterility and unprogressiveness of Buddhism, 
 stamping human nature as evil and all existence as 
 evil, the puerility of the Shamanistic and fetichistic 
 religions of Africa, Korea and China, the stagna- 
 tion, impotence and moral inferiority of Moham- 
 medanism. These cannot meet the intellectual 
 needs of any race of men, nor their moral needs, 
 because they present no perfect ideal, offer no 
 living, transforming power, give no real conception 
 of sin, nor of the value of truth, and have no ade- 
 quate sanctions. Nor can they meet men's social 
 needs in their debasement of women, their incapa- 
 bility of progress, their denial of the unity of man- 
 kind; nor men's spiritual needs; they are prac- 
 tically atheistic, do not teach the Fatherhood of 
 God, speak no word of true hope, have no Calvary. 
 "When I read these last words of the address," 
 the speaker went on, " I was brought to a decision: 
 
 "My fellow-students, as the owners and bearers of that 
 name, how can we withhold from the hearts of men the 
 sufficient message of their Father's life, their Father's love, 
 made known alone in our only Lord and Saviour, Jesus 
 Christ ? 
 
 "It is all true, friends, and I felt that it was true 
 all the time I was reading it; and I have failed to 
 see it before because I had but a faint and feeble 
 conception of what Jesus Christ has done for me. 
 I have had no dream, no vision; but Jesus Christ 
 
OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 is tenfold more real to me now than he was three 
 hours ago; and no longer by me shall the lamp of 
 life be denied to souls who are indeed benighted in 
 the darkness of sin and ignorance and superstition, 
 for whom there is but one sufficient light, which, 
 with the blessing of God, I will take to some of 
 them while life is spared." 
 
 He had scarcely ceased speaking when a man of 
 about sixty years of age, president of a large manu- 
 facturing concern, rose hurriedly to his feet and 
 came to the front. He was a Christian man, but 
 one whose voice had seldom been heard in the 
 church. He spoke nervously, but with much 
 feeling: 
 
 "Friends, I would much rather say nothing; but 
 my life has been too long open to your view for 
 me to honorably remain silent. You know how I 
 have made what money I have — honestly, I be- 
 lieve in all sincerity, so far as the world's ideas of 
 honesty go. I have never been a miser, nor closed 
 my ears altogether to the cry of the poor, and I 
 have contributed to public improvements and some 
 public charities, and have helped to support the 
 church. But I have come to the mournful con- 
 clusion, during these past few days, that all this time 
 that I have maintained a reputation for honesty, 
 I have been robbing God, and in so doing robbing 
 my fellow-men. 
 
 " You all know what a pride I have taken in that 
 new house of mine; how my wife and I spent 
 weeks and months planning how we should tear 
 
OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 down the old house, good as it was, and build 
 greater, though we had not a chick nor a child in 
 the world. Every detail was studied out, and no 
 expense was spared for architect, builder or 
 materials. And when the house was done, we 
 made journeys to New York and Boston, and up 
 and down New England, to find things both new 
 and antique to harmonize with the color scheme, 
 and did not spare ourselves to make our home al- 
 together the most attractive in Jaconsett. And 
 you know how, when the house was done, and we 
 had pronounced it good, and were ready to live 
 in it and enjoy it, suddenly my wife was taken ill, 
 the doctors could do nothing for her, and in the 
 course of a few weeks she died, and my beautiful 
 new house was left unto me desolate. 
 
 "lama Christian; my wife was a Christian, I 
 sincerely believe; but the life of both of us for 
 many years past has been that of the man who 
 pulled down his barns and built greater, and said 
 to his soul, 'Soul, thou hast much goods laid up 
 for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, be 
 merry' ; and the Lord has said to us both, — to my 
 wife in one way, to me in another, — 'Thou fool- 
 ish one, this night is thy soul required of thee; 
 whose then shall those things be which thou hast 
 provided?' To do as I have done, it has been 
 necessary to annually rob God of the percentage of 
 my profits which should have steadily gone into 
 his treasury in grateful acknowledgment of the 
 prosperity which he has given me; and many are the 
 

 90 OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 men who must have perished in ignorance and sin 
 because I have robbed them of the chance which 
 God had directed me to give them to hear the word 
 of life. 
 
 " Friends, my grief at the loss of my companion 
 a few weeks ago is made much heavier by the 
 realization that these opportunities lost by my 
 selfishness are gone, irretrievably gone. I cannot 
 bring back to life one of those who have passed out 
 into the dark through my neglect; but having 
 sadly awakened to the realization that a man's life 
 consisteth not in the abundance of the things which 
 he possesseth, I have no mind longer to play the 
 fool, but will henceforth seek to be rich toward 
 God. 
 
 "As proof of my sincerity in this resolution, I 
 shall take advantage of the first opportunity to sell 
 my new house, and devote the proceeds to the work 
 of missions, at home and abroad. Meanwhile I 
 shall be delighted to assume the support of either 
 of these two young men who have just volunteered 
 for foreign mission service. And I thank the Lord 
 that he has opened my eyes to my own position, to 
 which I was formerly as blind as the rich man of the 
 parable. Pray for me, friends, that the hard 
 chastening which has come to me may work out the 
 peaceable fruits of righteousness." 
 
 
 
 
OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 91 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 MR. STANTON was about to call for prayer, 
 when a young business man arose, saying: 
 " I know it is growing late; but this is too 
 important a time to adhere closely to regular hours, 
 and I want to tell you some thoughts which have 
 been burdening my mind this evening. I have 
 been taking quite an interest in the men's move- 
 ment, of which Brother Waterson was speaking. 
 I have not had the means to take the tour around 
 the world; but I have been at all the conventions 
 of the movement. Those meetings have been 
 mightily inspiring, I assure you. As one sat there 
 he could feel his heart burn within him, and no 
 sum seemed too great to raise for foreign missions, 
 that the great Presbyterian Church might do its 
 part by giving the light to its million people in the 
 next twenty years. What were five hundred 
 thousand dollars, or two million dollars, or six 
 million dollars, to this great church? All it 
 needed was information, education, interest, and 
 the work would be done. 
 
 " But, friends, have you noticed one thing ? The 
 thought has been thrusting itself upon me— and 
 most unwelcome it has been — that the men's boards 
 and the women's boards and the young people's 
 movements, and the brotherhoods and the sister- 
 hoods, have been announcing annually that the 
 

 OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 problem had been solved, that a campaign of 
 education and information and inspiration had 
 now been inaugurated which was going to bring 
 men and women and money to the boards in such 
 abundance that the world could be evangelized 
 in this generation. And I have been told by a 
 missionary friend that the board secretaries an- 
 nually write to them saying something like this: 
 'We have just engaged such and such men to 
 assist in the home department, or act as district 
 secretaries; and they, in consultation with us, are 
 adopting this and that and the other new scheme 
 to secure a contribution from every member of the 
 church and every child in the Sunday school. 
 Keep up your courage: the sympathies of the 
 church are with you; they are deeply interested in 
 your work; and when the financial depression is 
 past, and the presidential election is over, we shall 
 see a better day. The General Assembly was en- 
 thusiastic over the foreign mission report and the 
 speeches of the missionaries present, and we have 
 great hopes for the future.' Shouldn't you think 
 the missionaries would be made very happy by that 
 sort of assurances ? Alasj friends, that same mis- 
 sionary told me that that sort of letters has usually 
 followed another sort, in which the mission was 
 regretfully informed that, in spite of all the board 
 could do, and in spite of all the new measures for 
 interesting the church, the board had closed its 
 year with a deficit of ninety thousand dollars, 
 which, added to the last year's deficit of eighty 
 
 
 
OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 ' 
 
 thousand dollars, made one hundred and seventy 
 thousand dollars to burden the income of another 
 year. And in view of these distressing financial 
 facts, it was naturally impossible for the board to 
 provide for the growing work any more than had 
 been provided the year before; nothing could be 
 granted for new property, and new missionaries 
 could be sent only to fill vacancies. That is not one 
 year's record, but, with variations, the record of 
 many years. Yet our agencies and institutions to 
 'interest' the church have been multiplying tre- 
 mendously the past few years. 
 
 "I tell you, friends, when I heard that, I could 
 not help wondering whether what the church 
 needed was 'interesting,' or such an overwhelming 
 realization of the great facts of God and Satan and 
 sin and salvation and heaven and hell, and Christ 
 man's only Saviour, whether he be Jew or Gentile, 
 Christian or heathen, as shall make us feel as Christ 
 felt about the lost w T orld. The 'interest' of mission 
 study classes, and libraries and magazines and costly 
 round-the-world tours and splendid, expensive con- 
 ventions may be a large rate of interest on a very 
 small capital. The question is not so much how 
 much interest you and I get out of foreign missions 
 as it is how much capital we put into them. How 
 much stock do we take in them? I'll guarantee 
 that there will be no lack of the best kind of interest 
 in foreign missions when our capital is invested 
 there. Just look at the interest of that big Presby- 
 terian elder, who has invested some hundreds of 
 
 
OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 thousands, not of cold dollars, but of warm ones 
 fresh from the heart, on his world tour! Where his 
 treasure is, there his heart is; and I believe the 
 other side is true also, that where the heart is, 
 there the treasure is also pretty likely to be put. 
 "In a book I was reading the other day I came 
 across a few sentences on this subject which are 
 well worth repeating: 
 
 "The interest of the child is childlike; but the mere 
 interest of the adult is childish. Let us have interest in 
 the Sunday school, but let us have passion in the church. 
 We must expect more from the church than an interest 
 in that work of redemption, for which the Christ, whose 
 followers we are, endured the agony of a Gethsemane and 
 the heartbreak of a Calvary. The Master went to his death 
 amidst apparent failure and defeat, content to foresee 
 the result of that travail of his soul which should satisfy. 
 Must it be said that his church can only carry on his work 
 as she sees successes carefully tabulated into statistics, 
 which will enable her to work out the ratio between souls 
 saved and guineas subscribed? Can the work which was 
 initiated by the passion of the Christ only be carried on as 
 it appeals to the interest of the church ? 
 
 "During the past three or four days our church 
 here has shown a kind of interest far ahead of that 
 which holds great conventions and promises mil- 
 lions, — next year, — and lets the board close its year 
 one hundred and seventy thousand dollars in debt. 
 We are now experiencing something of the passion, 
 because we have seen the vision. The church as 
 a whole lacks the vision which you and I have 
 had; that is the trouble. Don't for a moment 
 
I 
 
 OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 ' 
 
 
 95 
 
 think that I don't believe in these conventions 
 and tours and promises; I believe in them most 
 heartily, but they are not the whole thing, nor 
 even a very large part of the whole; they are simply 
 the prospectus. God forbid that the men's move- 
 ment should prove to be all on paper or in the 
 air. The missionaries and the home church are 
 looking to it most hopefully, saying, 'Heretofore 
 we have been playing; now we are going to have 
 business principles applied, for the first time, on a 
 large scale, to foreign missions.' God grant they 
 may not be disappointed! 
 
 " Excuse me for talking so much about other 
 people instead of myself; but really these remarks 
 are of the nature of a confession, for they are only 
 the development of these few days of a new view 
 of Christ. And, for the first time, I have made my 
 offering on the new basis." 
 
 Again the pastor was about to vary the meeting, 
 but his people proved irrepressible. Several arose 
 to their feet at once, among them a lady, to whom 
 the men at once gave place. A well-to-do member 
 of the church, decidedly a society woman, all were 
 eager to hear what she had to say, especially when 
 they saw the strange new look of mingled grief and 
 resolution on her face. 
 
 " Friends, you will be surprised to hear from me, 
 I know; but when I think of the number of mis- 
 sionaries and native preachers and teachers that 
 I have eaten and drunk and worn in society life, 
 and that I have seen my friends burn, my face feels 
 
OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 fairly scorching with shame. Mind you, I don't 
 mean that I have come to believe that God does 
 not mean us to have a good time. Jesus himself 
 attended and blessed a wedding, and graced many 
 a feast with his presence; but he never esteemed 
 the social whirl an object in itself and for itself 
 worthy of the devotion of his life and the neglect 
 of other things — and I have. There are mission- 
 aries at my home now, laid up in jewel cases, and 
 others in safety-deposit vaults at the bank. It is 
 true that I have not gone so far in luxurious self- 
 indulgence as the woman of whom I heard the 
 other day, whose seaside house, occupied for six 
 or eight weeks in the year, cost two million dollars, 
 and who refused to let it for a season for two 
 hundred thousand dollars; but the chief reason 
 why I have not is, that I do not possess such sums 
 of money. I never have thought of my time or 
 my money or my voice~or my house or myself as 
 really belonging to God, to be used for him, though 
 I doubtless have heard our pastor state the fact a 
 great many times, and accepted it in a general way, 
 which never made a whit of difference in my life. 
 "It was largely from the force of a habit estab- 
 lished as a child (bless God for such habits, even 
 if they are nothing more) that I attended service 
 last Sunday morning. The vision of the Master 
 began its work then; but it had a hard subject to 
 work on, and even attendance at the evening ser- 
 vice did not suffice to condemn and shame me tu 
 myself. I knew that things could not go on as 
 
OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 they had been going; but I rebelled against any 
 change, and could see no prospect of happiness in 
 this life except in the society life which has filled 
 my heart until now. Monday did not bring peace; 
 Tuesday did not bring peace; and only to-night 
 have I found it, as I have been able to assent to 
 the words that have been spoken here by one after 
 another; and the real things of life have stood out 
 before me in sharp contrast to the unreal and, after 
 all, most unsatisfying — because incomplete and 
 fleeting — pleasures which have been mine. If he 
 will accept me, I mean to be henceforth one of 
 the companions of the present Christ; and I shall 
 make it my first business to-morrow to release some 
 of my tied-up or locked-up missionaries and send 
 them about the business which has so long been 
 calling in vain for them." 
 
 Several others were on their feet to speak at 
 once; but the one who finally caught the ear of the 
 house was a young man with a strong voice and 
 an evidently decided intention to be heard. 
 
 "You haven't heard a word from the doctors 
 yet," he said, "and there are a number of us here. 
 Indeed, it's a wonder what Jaconsett does with all 
 her doctors. There are streets where you can 
 count four or five in a row, and more on the next 
 block. For a city with as good a health record as 
 Jaconsett, I think we are pretty well supplied, and 
 competition grows a bit keen at times, as I can 
 testify since Dr. Jenkins moved in next door with 
 an enviable Pittsburg reputation. 
 
 fe 
 
OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 TnT 
 
 
 " Well now, really, when you come to think of it, 
 doesn't it seem a preposterous absurdity for the 
 fine young men to be crowding into this profession 
 and then hanging out their shingles in a fashionable 
 street, right next door to three or four more, while 
 there are great cities in the world which have never 
 seen a doctor in the least worthy of the name, and 
 where the people are born and grow up and are 
 married and raise families, and suffer from all 
 sorts of painful and loathsome diseases, with no 
 one familiar with the simplest remedies to aid 
 them, and plenty of people familiar with the most 
 complex witches' broths to pour down by the 
 gallon, and most disgusting and torturing plasters 
 and ointments to apply by the yard, and where 
 thousands die who might have lived, and thousands 
 live who would vastly better die? Does it strike 
 you as exactly in accordance with the American 
 sense of the eternal fitness of things for such a 
 state of things to continue, especially when you 
 add the farther fact that the vast majority of these 
 poor aching, twitching, mortifying, dying creatures 
 have no knowledge at all of another world of 
 opportunity and blessing and fullness of life beyond 
 this one? 
 
 " Now, I'm not going to urge the last men who 
 have come into our community to give up the losing 
 battle and go to China. It so happens, no one can 
 tell why, that I have secured more than my share 
 of paying practice in the competition. The rest 
 of the doctors in Jaconsett may have it for the 
 
OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 winning, for I am going to China, and at my own 
 charges." 
 
 "And I'll go with you"; "And I"; called out, 
 in most undignified fashion, two of Dr. Corson's 
 most intimate friends in the profession. Then one 
 or two persons of little faith began to tremble lest 
 an epidemic strike the city, and there be not enough 
 doctors to go around! 
 
 It was a fitting conclusion, and time to stop. 
 Mr. Stanton interposed by starting the long meter 
 doxology, after which he said: 
 
 "Lord, thou hast searched us and known us. 
 And, in the discovery of ourselves to ourselves, thou 
 hast brought us blessing far beyond our most 
 sanguine anticipations, for we have learned to 
 know thee, the only living and true God, and Jesus 
 Christ whom thou has sent; and this is eternal 
 life. Oh, give us that life yet more abundantly, 
 until in very deed for us to live shall be Christ, and 
 we shall have no will, nor desire to have, apart 
 from the perfect, the beautiful will of God. Accept 
 thou the living sacrifices which have been laid so 
 willingly on thine altar; and accept thou in like 
 manner those other sacrifices which represent the 
 life of those who cannot in person heed thy great 
 commission and go to the uttermost parts of the 
 earth, those whose work lies here, but who are un- 
 willing that the outreach of their hearts after thy 
 lost ones shall be limited by any country or any 
 race. Forgive all the past mistakes and failures 
 that have been confessed, before thee, in public or 
 
100 
 
 OVER AGAINST THE TREASURY 
 
 in the secret chamber; bless to the nations of the 
 world what we are now doing and resolve to do; 
 and make each one of us, and all who call them- 
 selves thy disciples, henceforth and forever, com- 
 panions of the present Christ. In his ever blessed 
 name, Amen." 
 
 The service closed; the congregation was dis- 
 missed; yet, in spite of the lateness of the hour the 
 people seemed in no haste to disperse. Many who 
 had given no public testimony were disposed to 
 linger and talk with friends, or with their pastor, 
 of their new relations with the Master and of the 
 limitless outreach of the possibilities which had 
 opened up for themselves and for the kingdom. 
 
 That was not the last meeting at which were 
 heard echoes of Foreign Missionary Sunday in 
 Jaconsett. Other churches were aroused, and the 
 movement spread to other denominations and other 
 cities until there was accomplished in actual fact, 
 by the spirit-filled companions of the present 
 Christ, that which so many " movements" had 
 undertaken and only partially succeeded in ac- 
 complishing — the actual winning, for the work of 
 taking Christ to the world, of both the hearts and 
 the treasures of the church, which Christ so long 
 ago redeemed to himself in his precious blood, and 
 which he had then commissioned for this very 
 purpose. 
 
 r 
 
17750TB 161 
 
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Princeton Theoloqica Seminar]/ Libraries 
 
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