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 Farther 
 
 Sympathy 
 
 American Baptist Foreign Mission Society 
 Ford Building, Boston, Mass. 
 
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The Farther Sympathy 
 
 F IFTH AVENUE and Forty-Second Street 
 at five o’clock in the afternoon is perhaps 
 the busiest corner on the globe. Limousines 
 and touring-cars, carriages and the equipage of 
 millionaires, dray wagons laden with freight, and 
 surface cars packed with human freight pass in 
 unending streams of transportation at right angles 
 to each other. The blue-coated sentinel in the 
 street enforces the traffic regulation of the law. 
 On the sidewalk the people throng and jostle one 
 another in multitudes — a great, cosmopolitan 
 crowd of the rich and the poor, the cultured and 
 the illiterate, the successful and also those who 
 under “the bludgeonings of chance” have gone 
 down in defeat. It is a great army of humanity, 
 eternally changing, yet always the same. 
 
 A CHINAMAN from a nearby laundry, in 
 disobedience to the policeman’s signal, 
 attempts to cross the street. At once he 
 is in the midst of a solid mass of moving vehicles. 
 Bewildered and frightened, like an animal at bay, 
 
he tries to dodge, then to retreat, then again to go 
 forward. Suddenly a big, red touring car looms 
 up before him. There is a hissing sound, a grind¬ 
 ing of brakes, a piercing shriek — then all is 
 confusion. The transportation system of the city 
 is temporarily demoralized, while instantly and 
 automatically a crbwd of two thousand people 
 form a circle about the wounded man who lies 
 unconscious in the street. The universal instinct 
 of humanitarianism again asserts itself. Not a 
 man or a woman in that crowd would refuse to 
 render some assistance to this injured fellow man. 
 Every heart finds itself responding to the impulse 
 of sympathy and compassion, and the entire 
 crowd, as it gazes upon the injured Chinaman, 
 realizes once more that, regardless of race or 
 climate, all men are brothers. 
 
 B UT WHAT about that Chinaman across the 
 sea? Is the instinct of humanitarianism so 
 thin and so shallow that it will not include 
 the millions who are injured by unsanitary en¬ 
 vironments, wounded and diseased by Oriental 
 plagues, baffled by adverse circumstances and 
 hopelessly discouraged by countless unanswered 
 prayers addressed to unknown gods? Is the arm 
 of American sympathy so short that it will not 
 reach across the Pacific? Does the idea of uni¬ 
 versal brotherhood embrace only the injured 
 
foreigner on our street and not the man across 
 the sea? 
 
 T ODAY we are hearing much about the 
 horrors of child labor in America. Re¬ 
 ports that stir up fiery furnaces of right¬ 
 eous indignation in the heart of every man come 
 to us regarding child wage earners in our coal 
 mines and our cotton mills, our factories and our 
 sweatshops. Church and State, Press and Labor 
 Union have united in a common crusade to drive 
 this terrible evil from our land. And the opposi¬ 
 tion against it is based not alone on the fact that 
 child labor means exorbitant profits to the capi¬ 
 talist, that child labor deprives our boys and girls 
 of needed hours of play and robs them of 
 opportunities for education, but also because child 
 labor places a heavy mortgage on the manhood 
 and the motherhood of tomorrow, from the fore¬ 
 closure of which there is no escape. 
 
 SB 
 
 B UT WHAT about the children of the non- 
 Christian nations across the sea? Will not 
 China and Japan need the manhood and 
 the motherhood of tomorrow as much as will 
 America? What about the hosts of child widows 
 of India doomed to a life of everlasting despair? 
 Are not these as worthy of our help and interest 
 as the children in our sweatshops? What about 
 those countless multitudes as yet unborn who come 
 
into being amid conditions and surroundings 
 where children are “spawned, not born,” only to 
 grow up in ignorance and superstition, in moral 
 filth and sin, only to spend their years like “a tale 
 that is told,” to find life a curse and not a joy, and 
 in the end only to “lay themselves down in their 
 last sleep”? What about these as well as the 
 children in our mills and factories? 
 
 W E ARE LIVING in an age in which the 
 problem of the American negro is com¬ 
 ing more and more to the foreground. 
 The negro population has increased from four 
 million, previous to the war, to more than ten mil¬ 
 lion at the present time. The negro needs to be 
 educated. He needs to be trained for citizenship. 
 Above all, he needs to be instructed in the princi¬ 
 ples of Christianity. And, although he presents to 
 us a problem which in the minds of some can 
 never be solved, we are, nevertheless, making 
 heroic efforts for his intellectual and moral prog¬ 
 ress. Industrial schools, colleges, home mission 
 endeavors in the South — all are making their 
 contributions toward the solution of the negro 
 problem. 
 
 B UT IS THERE not also a negro problem in 
 Africa that demands our attention just as 
 much as the problem in America? What 
 about an industrial school on the Congo? Is it 
 
not just as important as in Alabama? What 
 about that far-away mission station with its pio¬ 
 neer missionary deep in the jungles of Africa? Is 
 he not worthy of our support and interest? How 
 much have we really done for that great, dark 
 continent which Livingstone so fittingly described 
 as “the open sore of the world”? 
 
 I N OTHER WORDS, is foreign missions only 
 a vague, visionary dream of the Church, for 
 which we annually raise a collection, or is the 
 world-wide spread of Christianity a real man’s 
 job? Is your contribution to missions given 
 merely because you feel that it is the price you 
 have to pay in order to retain your respectability 
 as a member of the church, or do you give because 
 you believe that the Christian heritage which you 
 enjoy should also be bequeathed to the nations 
 who thus far have never heard of Jesus Christ? 
 Whatever your own personal attitude to Jesus 
 Christ may be, whatever loyalty you may have 
 toward your own church, however you may feel 
 the need of brotherhood, of Christianity and its 
 principles here in America, one thing is certain. 
 Your conviction as to the value and universal need 
 of Jesus Christ is measured by your interest, your 
 prayers, and your gifts for foreign missions. 
 
T HE BAPTIST DENOMINATION, during 
 the past year, gave for foreign missions an 
 average of seventy-four cents per indi¬ 
 vidual member. Think of it! Only six cents a 
 month for hospitals in China, for industrial train¬ 
 ing in Africa, for schools and colleges in India, 
 and for the preaching of righteousness and justice 
 and salvation through Christ in the non-Christian 
 world. Six cents a month for each member of the 
 Northern Baptist Convention! 
 
 E3E3 
 
 T HE CHINAMAN across the sea needs our 
 help as much as the man injured on the 
 street. The boy or girl in India needs our 
 help as much as the child in our factory. The 
 negro on the Congo needs to be trained as much 
 as his brother in America. And the whole world 
 needs Jesus Christ just as much as you and I need 
 Him. And when we once come to realize and 
 believe that, and then prove the depth of our con¬ 
 viction by the height of our giving, the “evangel¬ 
 ization of the world in this generation ” will no 
 longer be a goal toward which we are aiming, but 
 an accomplished fact of history. 
 
For additional literature or 
 any other information regarding 
 the work of the American Bap¬ 
 tist Foreign Mission Society , 
 write to any of the District 
 Secretaries or address. Literature 
 Department , Box hi, Boston , 
 Mass. 
 
 1023. 1st Ed. 15M. Nov. 1913