-itw-*”'-' ■' y Reinforcements from VT^ 3W,^ : ,( . , the Orient Marre'n, V1-t GARRETT PIRLfOA' Ev. i;‘rc.;N ILLINOIS. . • sv REINFORCEMENTS FROM THE ORIENT '••V ■ ft Ef .* M : ■ - s'. ' * *1 *...^ ‘ Oi, '■ 4 !«•" . -/V P 4 '. >■' •V;, .- 'V B-Wi' . «l< t « k . Aik Reinforcements for Our Church From the Orient A TIMELY APPEAL ADDRESSED TO ALL METHODIST EPISCOPAL MINISTERS AND LAYMEN RESIDENT IN THE UNITED STATES By WILLIAM FAIRFIELD WARREN. D.D. Boston University THE MISSIONARY SOCIETY OF THE METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH Rindge Literature Department 150 RFTH AVENUE. NEW YORK 'Price, 5 cents Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2016 https://archive.org/details/reinforcementsfoOOwarr REINFORCEMENTS FOR OUR CHURCH FROM THE ORIENT ILLIONS of Christians to be had for the asking. Thousands on thousands of Christian households whose children and children’s children lack only a sincere and properly expressed invitation to bring them within the fold of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Shall the invitation be given? Before me as I write lies the latest annual report of the United States Commissioner-General of Immigration. The year that has closed since its issue last June has broken all rec- ords in the history of immigration m this or any other country. A few Sundays ago, at the one port of New York, in the twelve hours of the one day, more than twelve thousand immigrants became Ameri- cans by domicile. Imagine the procession that every Sunday and every week day is moving m across our national boundaries at the other ports and the railway lines of entry. The aggregate for the last twelve months is over one million and twenty thousand souls. Whence come the majority of these “hordes?” You look over my shoulder at the Commissioner’s report and see that though the sons of Japan and China are coming by thousands, “more than ninety-five per cent.” still come from Europe. This relieves your mind a little. But Englishmen and Irish and Germans and Scandinavians no longer head the list. Far-away and unfamiliar nationalities and tongues are promi- nent in the newest tables. In the lists you see not only Greeks, and Russians, and Poles, but also Bohemians, Bosnians, Bulgarians, Croa- tians, Dalmatians, Lithuanians, Magyars, Roumanians, Ruthenians, Ser- vians, Slovenians, Slovaks, Syrians. People of Slavic stock outnumber every other. This stock alone has sent us almost a thousand a day for every working day of the past year. Is our Anglo-Saxon civilization and religion, after successfully resisting the impact of Celtic and Teu- tonic and Iberic immigrations, now at last to be submerged under an ir- resistible tide of Slavs and neighbors of the Slav? Believe it not. Be- lieve rather that having given to our nation and to its churches the best 6 REINFORCEMENTS FROM THE ORIENT that Western Europe could give, the God of our fathers is now euming to enrich us with the best that Eastern Europe can supply. As patriots and as Christians we often dishearten each other as we gloomily talk of our national and religious outlook. We ought to cease this dismal and damaging occupation and sing a doxology over the fact that the vast majority of these hundreds of thousands of newcomers are true dis- ciples of our Lord Jesus Christ, better fitted for some forms of Christian service among us than any native American can be. Look for a moment at the normal Slav, a respectable Russian. He never swears. He drinks less of his vodka than your New England grandfather’s Puritan parson did of rum and hard cider. He and the children he brings with him over the sea have been baptized in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. They have been instructed in a Christian catechism, and at confirmation in the church they deliberately renounced the devil and all his works. According to their light they are conscientious Christians, and have no idea of ever becoming anything else. Just over his heart this man wears day and night a little silver cross which he does not remove even when bathing. Before partaking of food or drink he makes over it the sign of the cross in remembrance of our Lord. When he passes a church, or an ikon of St. Paul, or other sacred reminder, he “crosses himself.” What means this? To him it means that in making his upward and downward ges- tures he is thinking of the thorn-pierced brow and wounded feet of the Crucified, and that in making the transverse horizontal movement he is thinking of the spike-torn hands and spear-pierced side. At every holy communion he reverently kisses the sacred body of his Lord as repre- sented upon the ivory crucifix extended to him, and then receives the sacred emblems, trustfully looking to Jesus as his only Saviour. Where can we better leave him in our thought? Look now at a little company of these Russians as they land at Ellis Island in New York harbor. Through what struggles of mind passed each of those fathers before the pinch of poverty or the bruise of oppression drove him at last to the desperate decision to abandon home and friends and homeland forever. What precious things had to be left behind! What more precious kindred and friends! What family hardships have been endured upon the long, long journey! What painful misgivings and fears fill the minds of these men, women and children, as each morning they wake to think anew of facing a world of utter strangers in a land where they can neither speak nor understand the commonest of words! Some of the family are perhaps already ill REINFORCEMENTS FROM THE ORIENT 7 and nigh unto death. Their little hoard of roubles will scarce suffice to feed the well a week beyond the time of landing. They were praying • From a copyright stereograph, 1904, by Underwood & Underwood, New Vork) Westward to the Land of Promise — A Shipload of Emigrants from Europe on their Way to New York people at home; be sure that in all their lives they never prayed as they are praying now. Here, then, is a glorious bow of promise overspanning the dark cloud of Slavic and other Oriental migrations. These far-wandering sheep of the Great Shepherd cannot be cared for by the territorially divided and 8 REINFORCEMENTS FROM THE ORIENT linguistically limited home-churches of Russia, Greece, Bulgaria, Servia, Montenegro, Syria, and the rest. TTiey are the providential w^ards of our American churches. We should look upon them as mighty rein- forcements coming to our aid in our titanic contest with sin and crime. Their multitudinous children new born in our land are all “of God’s kingdom, ’’ and therefore already “graciously entitled to baptism ’ at our hands. These people are the “strangers” to whom our Lord will refer at the Great Day; and we, as a church, and individuals, will stand or fall according as it shall be possible to say, “Ye took Me in,” or “Ye took Me not in.” They should not be addressed as “foreign devils,” or as unconverted people. They should be received in their true char- acter as brethren in the common faith, fully entitled to brotherly sym- pathy and aid. They should be welcomed to church fellowship. Any American church that will meet them in this way may gather them by the thousand. Our own, as the largest, most ecumenical, most democratic, and at least in ideals most evangelistic of all, has adaptations for this har- vest such as no other possesses. We ought to use them. We ought to do it for Christ’s sake, for His dispatriated followers’ sake, and for the sake of our country. For this high call of duty and line of privilege few of our pastors or flocks are as yet prepared. Not one in a hundred has sufficient breadth of view or scope of sympathy to be available for truly effective service. In their narrow native American prejudices the mass too much resemble the Judaizing party in the days of St. Paul. The average Methodist is willing to consider these Oriental strangers human beings, and as such in need of Christ and His salvation. But he assumes that as yet they know next to nothing of the one or the other, and that what they do know only aggravates their guilt in the sight of God. If exceptionally earnest, he says that mission halls should be erected, mis- sionaries of the Boanerges type placed in them, and thus efforts be made to deliver them from the power and service of Satan. We gladly admit that all this is in the line of commendable effort for the saving of such as are deliberately in the service of Satan, but who can wonder that Oriental Christians are not attracted to such halls by such bearers of the invitation? I verily believe that one of the divine purposes in bringing to us these myriads of foreigners from the remotest corners of Europe is that by inevitable contact with them American Christians of every name may soon acquire that cosmopolitan breadth of sympathy in re- ligious fellowship which in the sphere of secular citizenship we are rapidly acquiring. By and by our children may be as charmed with the REINFORCEMENTS FROM THE ORIENT 9 Oriental cruciform house of worship, foursquare and crowned with the five gilded domes, as we have been with houses built in the style of the younger and less convenient Gothic. In any case, let us hope and pray that those children may come to have sufficient breadth of Christly sym- (From a copyright stereograph, 1904, by Underwood 6 c Underwood, New York) At the Gateway of the Nation — Immigrants Landing at Ellis Island, New York pathy with all men to join at the last, and without a blush, in that choral song of the redeemed: “Thou art worthy to take the book, and to open the seals thereof; for Thou weist slam, and hast redeemed us to God by Thy blood out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, amd nation.” 10 REINFORCEMENTS FROM THE ORIENT To this point our appeal has dealt with its theme only in a general way and with reference to general principles. Many a reader is very likely saying: “Duty in the abstract is always easy of definition: the rub comes when we are set in fixed relations with actual human beings. Tell us what the average preacher, with an average church, in am aver- age American community, can do, and you will better deserve a hear- ing.” The word is well spoken. I feel the difficulty of attempting a just response. Here, however, is a letter of advice I lately wrote to a young pastor who was disheartened by the pressure of this precise prob- lem. It IS the best 1 can do to-day. May it call out far better counsels from brethren of larger pastoral experience: A LETTER Showing How One Decadent Pastoral Charge, Threatened with Extinction, Can Renew Its Own Christian Life, Save Its Community, and Aid In Saving the Nation. Dear Brother: — Your appeal of yesterday for advice touches me deeply. A cry from an old pupil is like a cry from one’s own child. And when you write in such discouragement over the irresistible tide of foreign life that is fast submerging your town, transforming its population, narrowing your field, and dooming your little church to slow but sure extinction, I am for the moment filled with your own distress. Thank God! it is only for the moment. We are not called to represent a dy- ing cause, or a dead Saviour. We are to live and work in the spirit of the Conscious Conqueror on high. We are to say with John (as the Revised Version correctly renders him) : “This is the victory that hath overcome the world, even our faith.” Remember that you are a repre- sentative of the faith that is already and forever conscious of accom- plished victory over the world. As such what have you to do in the presence of this portentous influx of foreign populations which so threat- ens the life of your little charge? 1 . Make this grave providential exigency the pressing burden of your prayers from this time forward, until your prayers can give place to praises. 2. Acquaint yourself as fully as possible with the character, and with the needs, temporal and spiritual, of these foreign families, especially of those just arriving from their distant homes. Were you going to any one of these Oriental lands as an ambassador of the United States, you would hasten to store your memory with the names of its great historic characters, to acquaint yourself with the master- pieces of its literature, and to make sure you were familiar with all the illustrious benefits conferred by its people upon mankind. You would expect to use this information, and to find it helpful in acquiring REINFORCEMENTS FROM THE ORIENT appropriate influence in your office. Shall the ambassador for the King of Heaven do less? 3. For one week put yourself and your family in the place of one of these newly arrived families, and ask yourself, daily, what you Off for their New Homes — Immigrants Leaving Jersey City for Points in the Interior would Wish good men to do unto you, were you in the heart of Russia, or Greece, with no prospect that either you, or your children, would ever again see your native land. 4. At the end of that week, full of tender sympathy, preach the sermon of your life, on the text. Lev. 19; 33, 34: “If a stranger so- 12 REINFORCEMENTS FROM THE ORIENT journ with thee in your land, ye shall not do him wrong. The stranger that sojourneth with you shall be unto you cis the home-born among you, and thou shall love him as thyself ; for ye were sojourners in the land of Egypt; I am Jehovah your God. ” 5. At the Sunday-school hour, address both teachers cind scholars on the Golden Rule, with close personal applications to their treatment of their neighbors of foreign birth, and to their altitude toward the children of those neighbors. 6. For Monday night call an extraordinary meeting of your offi- cicJ board. Pray with these brethren as you never before have prayed — it will be easy — then summon them to the inspiring work of trans- formmg the very forces which are threatening their church’s Lfe into forces of undreamed-of tnumph. 7. Summon them to give you at least a part of the financial patron- age of the church for use m enlisting the fnendly interest of two families of unshepherded foreigners. Ask simply for the use of the hundred dollars now paid for sexton service. Request them to nommate for a sexton a brother able and willing to serve without pay, and with the understanding that, with the advice of intelLgent leaders in the foreign community, he shall select two honest, well-mannered, cind God-fearing men of recent arrival, to hold the office of “assistant sextons,” responsi- ble to the sexton for the nght discharge of such duties in church house- cleaning, snow-shoveling, and furnace care, as he may assign, and re- ceiving each one dollar a Sunday for such service. 8. Impress upon these official brethren the momentous fact that, with this one simple and sensible arrangement, the parish will find itself possessed of two admirably qualified and efficient agents in the new field, men who week in and week out will be spreading abroad among their countrymen the impression that in your church they all have an orgrmized body of native American friends and helpers. 9. The new assistant sextons will from the first moment have great curiosity and desire to learn as much as they can about this New World church, and concerning its worship, so different from rmything they have ever seen. Their children will certainly share in this curiosity, and be delighted to receive rm invitation to attend the Sunday-school. TTie two men, rmd all their acquaintances, will be the more eager to send their children because of their great desire to have them acquire as early as possible the language of their new country. 10. Invite the two assistant-sextons to your house to tea frequently, one at a time at first. After tea, in conversation in your study, get them to tell you confidentially about the first prayers they were ever taught to use, and about the prayers they offered when trying to decide the great question of forever leaving their home and kindred for this land. Find out whether they are still men of habitual prayer. If they have ceased to be so, get them to renew the habit. Your own prayers with them on such an occasion will be sure to accomplish the end. 1 1 . Loan them, for their own use, and for the use of such of REINFORCEMENTS FROM THE ORIENT 13 their friends as can read English, good reading matter; not all hortatory and Biblical, but such as will strike the least interested as helpful in understanding their new citizenship, its duties and its privileges. Get them to . report to you families in special distress, cases of sickness and death, pases where your ladies’ sewing circle could help out a mother of children who is nearing the point of nervous collapse. 1 2. Often exhort your people to have a kind greeting for every recognizable foreigner whom they may meet on the street, or in business, and ask them to train their children to share their annual allowance for fireworks on the Fourth of July, always giving one-half, with their own hand, to some child of foreign birth. 1 3. Visit the immigrant families yourself — especially the newly arrived and those not shepherded by any priest or church. Show them that you are acquainted with the great heroes of their country’s history, and that you honor them. Inquire after their children. Speak of the fact that your church holds to a more precious doctrine of the relation of new-born children to Chnst and His kingdom than does any other in all Christendom. Mention also modestly the national and ecumenical character of your church. Tell them that it accords a spiritual home to thousands of Asiatics and Europeans, as well as to millions of Ameri- cans. Then explain to them our doctrine of childhood and its privi- leges. Ask them to tell their newly-arrived neighbors that you are ready to baptize, without fee of any sort, any new-born child of Christian parents, and also, when requested by the parents, to furnish the child with an English-speaking sponsor, one who will aid them in giving to the child the training needed until he is old enough to have the care of a regular class-leader, and be a member of the Epworth Junior League. 1 4. Meantime make up, with great care, a list of your wisest and most tactful members — the persons best able to appreciate and utilize the wonderful opportunities opened up by appointment to sponsorship to a new-born babe in a Greek, or Russian, or Polish, or Roumanian home in your town. Especially endeavor by private conversations to prepare a number of your maturer members in the Epworth League for this inspiring work. You will be astonished to see the effect of such an appointment on any sober Christian youth, even of seventeen. Put on him the responsibility of sponsorship for such a child in the humble home of a Greek, with the understanding that he is to visit the family at least once a month and inquire after the welfare of his little charge, to carry to the older children his accumulated Epworth Heralds, to report to his pastor sickness or distress in the family, to carry now and then some tickets to a church entertainment — and watch the result. Such a youth will quickly learn the delights and the rewards of Christian service, and in and by this precious experience our Lord will call many a one to a life-long service of His church in the Gospel ministry. 1 5. Before all this has been going on any considerable period of lime, your assistant-sextons will have become valuable recruiting agents for your Sunday congregations, as well as for your Sunday-school. At 14 REINFORCEMENTS FROM THE ORIENT the very outset they will want their relatives and neighbors to see what consideration is shown them by a body of native Americans, and what a fine, friendly gentleman their superior officer is. Serving on alternate Sundays, each will bring on a different day spectators and auditors from his own circle. Then, as in your pastoral interviews with them in your study you reawaken, and nourish, and intensify the religious life which Some Ruthenian School Boys with their Teacher * has never wholly died out within them, you will find, before you know it, that our Lord has put you in possession of two divinely called class- leaders — men qualified as no American could be to gather among their newly-arrived Russian, or Magyar, or Greek, or Polish countrymen, classes of well-meaning men, all baptized and confirmed members of an Oriental Church, all weary of the daily strain for life in the new land, doubly weary of the cruel prejudices against them, heartsick over the nick- names, and curses, and blows given them by cheating bosses and brutal * Cuts on this and following pages used by courtesy of ** Charities.** New York. REINFORCEMENTS FROM THE ORIENT 15 taskmasters, all glad to seek religious comfort and edification and good fellowship in a church whose members have shown them the only Chris- tian kindness they have found in a land that seems to them given over to violence, profanity, and greed. Through these class-leaders you will thenceforward, week by week, be speaking with tongues, and working veritable miracles of personal and social transformation. 1 6. Long before this time your now dying prayer-meeting will have suddenly become a center of marvelous life and power. The Triumphant Democracy — A Society Parade in a Mining Town attendants who used to waste the hour, and worse than waste it, in dole- ful wailings over the backslidden condition of the church and the hope- lessness of its future, will now be full of the joy of workers, working in blessed companionship with their Lord and with one another. Let me enter one of these meetings. A new assistant-sexton is reporting his joy of yesterday, when he succeeded in righting an outrageous wrong which a swindling interpreter was attempting to inflict on an honest work- man late from Athens. The choirmaster wants everybody to know that the girl who has just taken the first prize for singing in the public school is one from “our choir,” the very “Cecilia” over whom “our 16 REINFORCEMENTS FROM THE ORIENT pastor” was so rejoiced as his ‘‘first-fruits of Achaia.” Another brother has had the good fortune to find suitable employment for the poor Syrian widow who lately lost her hearing. Still another has, by God’s help, reawakened and reclaimed a backslidden Christian from Hungary, once a schoolmaster. He has brought him in, that he may testify his love and gratitude and his new purposes of devotion. He introduces him, and though his speech is Hungarian, his tears are perfect English, and Immigrant Children (Fruit Packers), in Baltimore his friend’s interpretation of the broken words fires all hearts as with a Pentecostal baptism. I 7. Now, your no longer dying church has the good will of the whole foreign community. Without a dollar’s expense it has a Hun- garian class-leader, a Greek class-leader, two Russian ones, all working in their several tongues and circles for you and for your Lord. Besides these you have Sunday-school children carrying your sermons and your Sunday-school helps into almost every foreign-born family in your town. Besides these you have 1 know not how many native Americans, English- speaking members, who as sponsors, Sunday-school teachers, Epworth League committees, etc., are helping you to show how the Gospel is the power of God unto salvation unto every one that believeth, to the Jew first, but also to the Gentile. What a changed situation! Your dying religious club of narrow-minded and brother-hating self-seekers has, by God’s grace and the application of a little common sense, become REINFORCEMENTS FROM THE ORIENT 17 transformed into a living church, an organization which, like its adorable Founder, now comes into human life, not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give its life a ransom tor many. 1 8. Long before this your work will have been observed by all true patriots in your section of the commonwealth; and they will rejoice in it with a great joy. They will send you funds for its furtherance. They will see with unspeakable satisfaction that you are solving the problem as to the gaming of a pure, intelligent, and conscientious ballot for township and state and nation. They will feel assured that in your community these fast-naturalized Orientals are not going to be given over to the bids and bribe.' and lying promises of unprincipled political bum- mers and party-bosses. They will see that the men to whom the newly naturalized are going to look for advice and information on political issues are the Christian young men who, as sponsors and Christian friends, have been welcome monthly visitors in their families, instructors of their children, and almoners of unselfish benefactions. Patriotic men and women of other churches, and of no church, will applaud the work by which you have saved not only your church, and your neighbors, but also, in more than your measure, your town, your state and nation as well. 19. ^ ear by year, as this work goes on, you will have a message for preachers’ meetings, for Christian conventions and conferences. When invited to attend such, you will not have to cudgel your weary brain to find some theme adapted to illustrate your brilliancy or scholarship, and possibly, as an incident, to entertain or profit the assembled thousands. Ah, no! People will hang upon your lips, as with full heart you recite in their hearing the latest chapters in your new Book of the Acts. They will catch inspiration from the example you have set. They will dupli- cate your achievement in so many places that, in a little time, the great polyglot, international, Ecumenical Church to which you belong will be looked upon in all lands as the leading “world-power” in the imperial expansion of God’s kingdom. Men will say: Here is a modern edition of the apostolic church, one which has seen the Petrine vision of the great sheet, knitted at the four corners and let down from heaven, and seen it to some purpose. Meantime, I am going to get our Lord to give me at least half a dozen new professors for each of our leading theolog- ical schools, who, in as many different tongues, shall be helping to train — in part from your converts^ — wide-visioned teachers, and evangelists, and missionaries for all lands and all tongues on this redeemed planet. He already knows where the money is wherewith this mighty work can be done, and He knows who among His countless saints are to have the glory and joy of so applying it. 20. Live, personally, in such intimacy of communion with our Lord that He can keep you day by day from every peril resulting from littleness of faith, and from every peril resulting from astounding success. Spiritual self-distrust and sc)iritual self-conceit are alike fatal to one called with such a divine calling as that which I have here so imperfectly set before you. 18 REINFORCEMENTS FROM THE ORIENT But my letter is getting too long. More advices are not needed to-day. As soon as you have carried out the suggestions already made, write me for more. Ever affectionately yours, (Signed by the Writer.) MORE ABOUT THOSE SPONSORS A Supplementary Letter In my plea for a Christian reception of Christian families coming to us as immigrants from the Orient, 1 recommend that every pastor should cause to be circulated among these new comers in every part ot his place of residence two offers: First, gratuitously to baptize their new-born children; second, gratuitously to provide a suitable English- speaking sponsor for each child baptized. The second part of this suggestion has excited no little interest, especially among our younger pastors, but the time-honored office of the sponsor has fallen into such utter disuse in our busy church that many of the younger men, even in the pastorate, feel their need of further Ught upon it, and upon its promise and potency as a means of gaining salutary influence in and with our immigrant families. It is with the hope of benefiting such inter- ested inquirers that the following paragraphs are submitted: I . In the thought of all Old World Christians sponsorship and infant baptism are inseparably connected. To offer the latter to a newly arrived family, with no recognition of sponsors in the ceremony, would seem to the adult members of that family an offer to mutilate a most sacred rite of their holy religion. They have never seen, or perhaps heard of, a child-baptism at which there have not been present one or more persons in the capacity of sponsors. Whoever, therefore, in any given case, proffers to these comers his service for the baptism of a child new-born to the household, should, first of all, have and show sufficient understanding of the parents’ ideas and usages and felt needs to inquire of them in advance, and with genuine solicitude, whether, here among strangers, in a stranger land, they have succeeded in finding satisfactory godparents for the little one. The question will be sure to touch a tender spot in the breast of the parents, for in nine cases out of ten just the relatives or others whom they would most of all desire to see placed in this sacred relation to the child are among the dear ones whom they have had to leave behind in the old home hamlet in far-away Russia, or Greece, or Bulgaria. Then will come your precious oppor- tunity. To the parents in this embarrassment, not knowing what they can do, you make the friendly offer to procure for the needed service a true Christian, ore who so loves Christ that his sympathies are not con- fined to people of his owm nationality, or race, or tongue; one who, being a native of the new-bom’s future land and a speaker of its language. REINFORCEMENTS FROM THE ORIENT 19 volunteers to care for the babe’s future nurture in Christian doctrine and living in a way that only genuine Christian love can prompt. Under such circumstances as these, it is evident that the offer and acceptance of the sponsorship touches that family as no bare offer or performance of a sponsorless ceremony of simple baptism could ever do. Genuine Christian love has made its overture; this has had its due response, and the bond which has resulted conditions an immortal history. The finish of the momentary professional service marks but the beginning of the precious and permanent personal self-impartation of Christ’s represen- tative in the person of the sponsor. 2. Even if the parents in the supposed case have found in their randomly populated quarter of your town a person whom they are will- ing or desirous to have assume the duties of a godfather or godmother Slovak Homes in the Pennsylvania Anthracite Region to their America-bom babe, the good offices of an additional America- born sponsor, if offered, are not likely to be unappreciated. For more than half a thousand years this law has held its place in the Church of England: “There should be for every male child that is to be baptized two godfathers and one godmother, and for every female one godfather and two godmothers.” Moreover, until recently, a canon of the same church read: “No parent is to be admitted to answer as godfather for his own child.” The Continental churches have had like provisions. In several countries, to prevent undue multiplication, laws have been made limiting the number to three. Our supposed family is accustomed to sponsorships including two and three persons. Even if it has selected two of its own nationality, it will gladly add a third to represent its newly dawning nationality. These recently arrived parents are greatly impressed by the fact that their America-bom babe is soon to be what its father can never be, an America-born citizen of the Great Republic, and that equally soon he ought to be a well-developed Christian standing 20 REINFORCEMENTS FROM THE ORIENT in normal relations to all other America-born Christians within the Great Republic. For the securing of this end no available provision will seem to them to have such evident fitness and promise as this of a personal Christian friend publicly self-pledged, for Christ’s sake, to see that their httle one shall have a publicly recognized entree to the sympathies and prayers and fellowships of American Christians as fast as his increasing years shrill permit. More than this. Separated for all time from the church of their own childhood and manhood, these spiritually homeless parents will quickly experience the dawning of a vague but precious hope that, one day, through this their very own little American, they may themselves come to feel at home in the land and the church in which, by God’s grace, their babe has already come to be a native. 3. What a field for fruitful Chnstian activity is here opened be- fore every local church! Here even the dpng parish can find resurrec- tion life. Nowhere is the battle lost if such reserves have not yet been brought into action. The service is one which an angel in heaven might well covet. It carries with it the respect and honor and love of a new home. It confers the right to prepare a guest for heaven’s eternal feast. It honors lay gifts and lay agency. It enables the church to utilize thous- ands of men and women every way qualified to serve as Sunday-school teachers, but so situated that they must be excused. For each volun- teer in the service it means a widening of intellectual vision, deliverance from ignoble prejudices, growth in public influence, larger measures of divine approval day by day. What it must mean for the future of our country, and for the kingdom of God, was imperfectly hinted in the appeal to which this letter is a supplement.