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 BIBLE HOUSE, NEW YORK. 
 
 THE MOTIVE POWER IN 
 HOME MISSIONS. 
 
 BY REV. JAMES BRAND, OBERLIN, OHIO. 
 
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 I. What is the motive power in our Hotne 
 Missionary Work ? We all believe it must be a 
 real power. A tremendous weight is to be lifted. 
 What power is adequate? Where does it reside? 
 
 Not, I reply, in amended organizations. All 
 organization is but the tool of power. Not in the 
 liberalism of emasculated doctrines. Negations 
 are not a power. The world needs a power. 
 Not in patriotism. Patriotism touches bottom 
 in no man’s soul, simply because country is after 
 all not the highest end. To maintain our Prot¬ 
 estant faith and our Western civilization, and so 
 build up a great, healthy, homogeneous people 
 delivered from the ulcerous sores of the oriental 
 nations, is a great motive; but to the true child 
 of God it is only a means to an end, after all. 
 Neither does the power lie in denominational zeal. 
 None of these can lift men’s souls to the sustained,- 
 heroic, God-like service of Home Missions. 
 
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 What then is the motive power? It must be 
 the same as in God, for we are made in God’s 
 image. What was the power that moved God to 
 his world-mission ? It had two grand elements— 
 need and love. The need, to God’s mind, was 
 not national but human: not better government 
 and more bread, but redemption from the guilt 
 and doom of sin. When Christ wept over men, 
 it was not over their need of a homestead but of 
 virtue. An atheist can mourn over our pains, 
 but only God or the man of God laments over 
 our guilt. It was the wrath to come that ap¬ 
 palled Christ. To him, one lost soul was in 
 itself a universe of woe. And here, even in our 
 own land, there may be forty millions unsaved ! 
 So appalling is this need, as Christ viewed it, that 
 some men have rushed distracted from its con¬ 
 templation to solace themselves with the forlorn 
 hope that surely it is too dreadful to be true.” 
 Such is the need. 
 
 Our danger is, that in the working of our 
 Christian missions, we shall crowd it into the 
 background and put education, material develop¬ 
 ment, or national stability as our goal, and so 
 obscure the real reason for Christ’s mission and 
 ours. * 
 
 The other element is love. “ God so loved 
 the world, that he gave his only Son.” Were it 
 not that these words have fallen so long on dead 
 hearts they would startle the nations into wonder¬ 
 ing adoration, as they do the angels. God so 
 
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 loved that he could not bear this dropping of souls 
 into an eternity of doom; and he cannot bear it 
 to-day. We talk about the great “emergency” 
 in our mission work. It is because there is an 
 emergency in the divine mind. God sees here 
 to-day probably fifty-three millions of people, 
 increasing at the rate of nearly seven hundred 
 thousand a year by immigration alone, and only 
 one in five a redeemed soul ! It was out of this 
 love that the gospel itself was born. It is this 
 that determines and explains the very form and 
 intensity of God’s address to men. It was this 
 that found expression in the out-gushing compas¬ 
 sion of Jesus when he saw “ the multitudes as 
 sheep without a shepherd,” and cried out with 
 that deep cry which is still echoing down the ages, 
 “ the harvest truly is plenteous but the laborers 
 are few.” Now the fact with which the Home 
 Missionary Society has to grapple, is not primarily 
 that so many diverse nationalities are coming in 
 upon us as to wreck our government and our 
 Anglo-Saxon civilization, but that these millions 
 are perishing in their sins. The problem which 
 our churches have on hand is this: Given mil¬ 
 lions of lost souls and a gospel adequate to save 
 them ; required —how to apply it. Nothing else 
 but this saving of men from a lost eternity is a 
 motive great enough to give our mission work the 
 true evangelistic momentum. Mere humanitari- 
 anism droops and dies under the weight of either 
 home or foreign missions. But this motive power 
 
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 of which: I speak, is the winged messenger of 
 hope. Look at the sublime audacity of faith 
 and hopefulness for man, exhibited by those who 
 came with the story of Christ into that hell of 
 rotting heathenism, the Roman Empire. The 
 greatest men had become abject. Simonides and 
 Seneca and Pliny had concluded that the 1 * aim of 
 philosophy ” was to teach men to despise life. 
 But Paul and the Christian fathers announced a 
 gospel of hope. The empire felt it, like the first 
 thrill of returning life to a putrefying corpse. 
 The presentation of Home Missionary geography 
 with its vast extent and its spiritual blight may 
 move the mind for a time with a kind of moral 
 intoxication, but our mission work never puts on 
 its true grandeur till we thus trace its origin to 
 the divine decree and connect its progress with the 
 eternal years of God. 
 
 II. What now is the hindrance in the way 
 of an enlarged missionary work ? 
 
 I reply, not chiefly the lack of knowledge. 
 We know more than we feel. Not the lack of 
 material in the churches. Not the lack of money. 
 Not the defective policy of the American Home 
 Missionary Society. That Society is one of the 
 noblest and most richly blessed in the world. Its 
 history is an inspiration. Its officers are hardly 
 to be matched for wisdom, ability, and consecra¬ 
 tion, The real hindrance lies in the lack of whole- 
 souled loyalty to Christ among his people. The 
 
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 great motive which moved God to come into this 
 world of sin and suffering has not taken hold of 
 us. Christ’s conception of the Christian life and 
 mission has been but feebly grasped or not grasped 
 at all. 
 
 III. What then are the duties of the hour ? 
 
 (1) The first and most important of all is to 
 turn and hold attention to this motive power— 
 infinite need and love. Our missionary work 
 must partake of the tremendous seriousness which 
 lay upon the soul of Christ when he came to a 
 doomed world to pull souls out of the fire. 
 Gethsemane ! Calvary ! must be the watch-words 
 of God’s missionary hosts. Once here, and at 
 the work, it was a small thing to Christ, who 
 laughed or wept, or who drove the nails through 
 his hands and feet. They must be driven. 
 
 (2) We must recognize and emphasize the ele¬ 
 ment of time. God is the author of “emergen¬ 
 cies.” There are times when, historically viewed, 
 God seems not to be in a hurry. His infinite 
 benevolence is always guided by his eternal wis¬ 
 dom. His compassion never leads him to precip¬ 
 itate a movement till all the circumstances are 
 ripe for the best possible result. The cries and 
 tears and groans of his people in Egypt did not 
 shorten the years of Moses’ preparation for his 
 mission by the space of one hour. Forty years 
 at the court of Pharaoh must be followed by 
 forty more at the “back side of the desert.” 
 
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 Then the people were led out. As a nation God 
 has kept us at the “back side of the desert ” for 
 more than a hundred years, till at last all things 
 are ready on a gigantic scale. God’s emergency 
 is here. He is now in a hurry. Hew settlement, 
 foreign settlement, unparalleled rapidity of settle¬ 
 ment, godless settlement,—these are facts unique 
 in our land, which God is thrusting upon us 
 now. 
 
 (3) We must recognize the moral elements of 
 danger entering into the foundation of Western 
 Society. The antagonism of different nationalities, 
 in their views of religious duty, is one. The mil¬ 
 lions are coming here, not for religion, but for 
 liberty and bread, and they bring their moral 
 standards with them. The threatened loss of the 
 Christian Sabbath is another. The spirit of 
 Sabbath desecration, supported by old world in¬ 
 fidelity and new world lust for gain, is laying its 
 foundations in all the boundless, plastic West. 
 Then too, more appalling than any other one 
 thing that opposes the Kingdom of Christ, is the 
 omnipresence,-—I might almost say the omnip¬ 
 otence—in this land, of the Satanic confederacy 
 of the liquor traffic. It is the one foe that 
 conspires openly against all religion and all law 
 except the “ law of sin and death.” It furnishes 
 us one fifth of our National revenue, and so puts 
 its yoke on the nation's neck. And this gigantic 
 defiance, this Satanic confederacy against God 
 and virtue, before which political parties crouch 
 
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 and quail and bend the knee, has its home and 
 foreign missions too. It is the first on every 
 home missionary field, and is laying its founda¬ 
 tions for future empire as well as we. 
 
 What now is God’s message to the churches? 
 Is it not this : that they are failing to grasp his 
 thought and to appreciate his emergency ? We 
 are gaining ground; we are waking up; but 
 we are not waking up fast enough to keep pace 
 with this mighty movement of God’s providence. 
 We are like Rip Van Winkle, waking up after 
 miglity changes and trying to meet the demands 
 of to-day with the supplies of twenty years ago. 
 The kingdom of God has but one great hindrance 
 in this land. It is not Mormonism, or Romanism, 
 or Infidelity—it is selfishness in the church of 
 Christ. Christ has not really got the men, and 
 so cannot get the money. When he gets the 
 men, he will have the money. 
 
 What is God's message to the ministry ? 
 This : We, who preach Christ, standing as we do 
 before this problem of the world’s conversion, 
 must take a new position. We must define con¬ 
 version and church membership aneiu in the light, 
 not of the past, but of the present. We must 
 make, in our life and our preaching to the church, 
 the parting with earthly goods for the love of 
 Christ, more and more the test of religion. If 
 we do our duty in these marvelous days and adjust 
 ourselves to a great future, we must preach more 
 and more the principles and grandeur of mission- 
 
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 ary work. Oh, the mighty need of large, unselfish 
 Christian sympathies ; of conquering faith ; of 
 deep, burning convictions like those of Jesus; of 
 outflaming zeal and enthusiasm for missions in all 
 the pulpits of this land ! 
 
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