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 PLACE OF MISSIONS IN THE 
 THOUGHT OF GOD 
 
 BY ROBERT E. SPEER, M.A. 
 
 
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 LAYMEN'S MISSIONARY MOVEMENT 
 
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THE PLACE OF MISSIONS IN 
 THE THOUGHT OF GOD 
 
 An address delivered at the Foreign Missionary Jubilee Convention of 
 the United Presbyterian Church, Pittsburg, Pa., December 6-8, 1904 
 
 BY 
 
 ROBERT E. SPEER, M.A. 
 
Copyright, 1907 
 
 The Board of Foreign Missions 
 of the 
 
 United Presbyterian Church of N. A. 
 
 The price of this pamphlet is 5 cents 
 per copy, 40 cents per dozen, $2.50 
 per hundred, express charges prepaid. 
 
THE PLACE OF MISSIONS IN THE THOUGHT 
 :: :: :: OF GOD :: :: :: 
 
 N thinking and planning about missions it is a 
 wise thing for us to try to go down as deep as 
 deep as we can and to lay this missionary enter¬ 
 prise on its very bottommost foundation. That 
 foundation is not found in the consideration of 
 the results and triumphs of the missionary work, great and 
 beneficent and of divine character as we believe these to be. A 
 powerful argument undoubtedly can be made on behalf of the 
 missionary enterprise and the obligation of the Christian Church 
 to carry it forward on the basis of the greatness and beneficence 
 of its results. I believe it can be proved that there is no power 
 in the world comparable with the power of Christian Missions 
 to transform the lives of men and introduce better conditions of 
 life. In his great book on Christian Missions and Social Prog¬ 
 ress, Dr. Dennis has made out his case unanswerably. I be¬ 
 lieve it can be proved that there is no force in the world com¬ 
 parable with the force of Christian Missions upon the politics 
 of nations, to bring about better government in the world. And 
 we all believe that there is no force like the force of missions 
 comparable in power to accomplish the spiritual transformation 
 
2 
 
 MISSIONS IN THE THOUGHT OF GOD 
 
 of character and to awaken in the dead souls of men the very 
 life of God. 
 
 And there are circumstances, doubtless, when the argu¬ 
 ment on behalf of missions, grounded on considerations like 
 these, is the most powerful argument that can be urged. It 
 is wrong for us not to think of considerations like these. If 
 our movement cannot be judged by its fruits it can make no 
 appeal whatever to reasonable and thoughtful men. And noth¬ 
 ing could be more natural than that now and then we should 
 pause to look back over what we have tried to do, and ask 
 ourselves, whether we have been doing wisely and whether what 
 we have succeeded in doing has justified all its enormous cost 
 of money and life. 
 
 And yet there is a deeper ground than this on which to 
 rest the missionary enterprise. The consideration of its triumphs 
 is not always applicable. If in the early days of your mission¬ 
 ary enterprise men should have challenged your right to pro¬ 
 ceed with this enterprise, on the ground that the results were 
 inadequate, you would have had no reply. I read only a few 
 days ago a letter from one of our secretaries who has just gone 
 out to visit our missions in western Africa, and he spoke of hav¬ 
 ing met, on the steamship on which he was going, two mission¬ 
 aries of the English church who had wrought for seven years 
 with only two converts, and one of those a little lad of twelve, 
 in Hausaland. For eleven years the missionaries wrought in 
 Foo Chow with only two converts, and after the first twenty- 
 three years of our mission work in South China, we numbered 
 only thirty converts. And if we are to justify our missionary 
 enterprise in the Mohammedan world on the ground of the visi- 
 
MISSIONS IN THE THOUGHT OF GOD 
 
 3 
 
 ble results and have no other evidence in its support, I suspect 
 we would be able ill to command the support and sympathy of 
 a great body of Christian men. 
 
 And not only is this argument not always applicable, but 
 there is no such binding obligation in it as is to be found in the 
 great foundation of missionary enterprise. I may persuade a 
 man that the missionary enterprise can accomplish great re¬ 
 sults, that it ameliorates the conditions of human life, that it 
 purifies the institutions under which men live, but I cannot con¬ 
 vince him by arguments like these that he is bound by obligations 
 that he cannot escape, to participate in this great enterprise. 
 What we should want to do, it seems to me, is to discover to 
 ourselves again those unassailable foundations on which this en¬ 
 terprise rests, and on which rests the obligation from which the 
 Christian Church cannot release itself. What I should like 
 to speak about for a little while, accordingly, in the place of 
 missions in the thought of God, and the obligation to carry for¬ 
 ward the missionary enterprise that rests on all Christians, be¬ 
 cause the missionary enterprise is thus grounded supremely in 
 the thought of God himself. 
 
 Let us think at the outset for just a moment of the place 
 of missions in the thought of God as revealed to us by what 
 we know about His character. We believe in Him as the soli¬ 
 tary God, the one God, the one true God. If men do not own 
 Him for their God, they are Godless men. By just as much 
 as we believe that our God is the one God, must we believe 
 that He is the God of every man, the whole world around. 
 As we believe in His Omnipotence and His solitariness we be¬ 
 lieve also in His love, and know that no man anywhere in the 
 
4 
 
 MISSIONS IN THE THOUGHT OF GOD 
 
 world can slip out of the affection of the Father, that it is not 
 His Will that any man should perish, but that all the world 
 should come to repentance and to life; and that His great father 
 heart is beating in patient and eager love for every human soul. 
 We see these great affections of God going out toward men 
 in the history of His revelation of His life in the world. We 
 realize that He had to begin with some single race, and it is not 
 strange that that race came to think that it was not the channel 
 alone, but the end of the love and grace of God. But as we 
 look back over the years we realize that He began with that 
 one race, not that He might end with it, but because He must 
 begin somewhere in the world of men, intending never to end 
 until He had gathered in the whole world and every tongue 
 should confess Him as its Father and its God. We cannot 
 think of God without thinking of Him—I say it reverently— 
 as a missionary God. If He were anything else than that, 
 we could not think of Him as being God at all. Our very 
 conception of Him, of His attributes, of His qualities, com¬ 
 pels us to think of Him as the God of the whole world, and 
 of the whole world as His. 
 
 Think in the second place of the revelation we have of 
 the place of missions in His thought as revealed in His Son. 
 Whatever limitation there may be to the law of heredity any¬ 
 where in life, there is no limitation to that law in God. What¬ 
 ever we see in God’s Son we may be sure we shall find in God. 
 We think over the life of our Lord Jesus Christ, and His 
 coming here was a missionary act, a mission, so to speak. He 
 was always referring to it so. “I came not to do My own Will, 
 but the Will of Him That sent me.” ‘‘He that sent Me is 
 
MISSIONS IN THE THOUGHT OF GOD 
 
 5 
 
 with Me.” “ The Father hath sent the Son to be the Saviour 
 of the world.” His conception of His coming into this world 
 of ours was a purely missionary conception, and those who 
 associated with Him, from old Simeon, as he took the little 
 child in his arms in His infancy, down to the very last day, 
 realized that His presence here was a great revelation of the 
 missionary affections of God. The message that He spoke 
 here in the world was a missionary message, a message to all 
 men, Jew and Gentile, rich and poor, Pharisee and Publican. 
 The message that He spoke was a message to all men, an ade¬ 
 quate supply for every man’s need, rich man, poor man, Jew 
 and Gentile, saint and sinner, to every man He came, realizing 
 that every man had need of Him. 
 
 The spirit that He manifested while He walked in the 
 world was a missionary spirit. Born in the limitations of His 
 own race and time, the noble thing about Him was that He saw 
 no narrower horizon than the uttermost souls of men, that He 
 went through the world free from all petty racial jealousies 
 and ill feelings and divisions, loving the whole world with an 
 equal heart. “I am the light of the world,” was His Word. 
 “The bread which I will give is My flesh which I will give for 
 the life of the world.” “And I, if I be lifted up, will draw 
 all men unto Me.” “Other sheep I have, not of this (Jewish) 
 fold, them also I must bring, and they shall hear My voice 
 and there shall be one flock, and one Shepherd.” The spirit 
 that guided Him from the beginning until at the last He died 
 a propitiation for the sins of the whole world, was the mission¬ 
 ary spirit. His prayers were missionary prayers. We have 
 only a few of those prayers preserved to us, some of them very 
 
6 
 
 MISSIONS IN THE THOUGHT OF GOD 
 
 fragmentary, but in the two prayers that seem in some adequate 
 measure to reveal to us His inner life of prayer, we get visions 
 of what the missionary spirit must have been in His prayer life. 
 When giving to His disciples what we call the “Lord’s 
 Prayer,’’ He embodied in it at the beginning that great pe¬ 
 tition “Thy Kingdom Come,’’ and I have often wondered 
 over the meaning of that little phrase in His last high-priestly 
 prayer as He walked out to His betrayal, where in His petition 
 on behalf of His disciples, He remarks, “I pray not for the 
 world, but for these whom T hou hast given Me out of the 
 world.’’ Why does He say “not for the world” unless He 
 meant to imply that that was what He was wont to do? 
 It might be supposed that that would be what He would do 
 now. The disciples could have gathered no other interpretation 
 from His life than that which they did gather, that God was 
 in Him reconciling the world to Himself. A great German 
 ethnologist has pointed out that after all one of the most com¬ 
 manding sayings of St. Paul is the expression where he describes 
 the vast missionary influence of Christ, when he utters his opin¬ 
 ion that in Christ the three great divisions that had divided the 
 ancient world had all been obliterated, the line of distinction 
 between male and female, between bond and freeman, between 
 the privileged Jew and the outer and unprivileged world. 
 
 Those who touch Christ and feel His influence behold in 
 Him the revelation of the great missionary heart of God, and 
 not alone in the character of God, and in that character as 
 revealed in Jesus Christ our Lord have we some clear concep¬ 
 tion of the place this missionary enterprise holds in God’s 
 thought; we have it also here in what we firmly believe to be 
 
MISSIONS IN THE THOUGHT OF GOD 
 
 7 
 
 the word of God. It is this Book that tells us that to which I 
 have just been giving expression regarding the spirit of Jesus 
 Christ. i his book itself is the record of the great missionary 
 enterprise begun in the heart of God and carried on down 
 until this day, and never to end until the Kingdoms of this 
 world have become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ. 
 It is a missionary book not alone here and there, not in the force 
 of some occasional missionary saying or in some clear word of 
 missionary prophecy, but the missionary spirit is of the very 
 essence of the Bible. So that you cannot take the missionary 
 element out of the Bible and have any Bible left at all. It 
 is grounded in every text of the Word of God as it is grounded 
 in the very character of God himself. You cannot read this 
 revelation without feeling your heart drawn out to the whole 
 world as His heart was drawn out for it, and no man out in the 
 darkened world can read it without feeling that the God of that 
 book is his God because He is the God of all mankind. 
 
 In the fourth place we look out over history, and history 
 reveals to us the place of missions in the thought of God. No 
 man can understand human history who does not read it in the 
 .light of the place that the missionary enterprise fills in God’s 
 thought. We cannot understand the history of the Christian 
 Church save on this basis. The history of that old Jewish 
 church becomes just a torso, a fragment, a contradiction of the 
 God who is superintending it, unless we read it all in its mission¬ 
 ary implication, and as just a preparation for a great and uni¬ 
 versal expression of the love of God to all mankind. A Christian 
 Church is founded on no other principle than this, the simple 
 principle that it is by outgo that we live and that we have in 
 
8 
 
 MISSIONS IN THE THOUGHT OF GOD 
 
 order that we may share. I believe myself that the Christian 
 Church rests on the very same principle on which the individual 
 Christian life rests and that the man who seeks to save his life 
 shall lose it, and by the same law the Christian Church that 
 seeks to save her life shall lose it. That the Christian Church 
 is no more established for her own spiritual growth and self- 
 cultivation than that individual Christians are called for the 
 cultivation of their own characters as the supreme aim of their 
 calling. We are called to serve our own generation and the 
 character that we get is simply a by-product of our service, and 
 by just the same law I believe that the Christian Church is 
 called to serve the world, and her spiritual growth comes to her 
 as she goes out in the furtherance of her great missionary -un¬ 
 selfishness like the mission of unselfishness that led her Lord to 
 come not to be ministered unto but to minister and to fulfil His 
 life in laying it down as a ransom for many. And the very 
 laws of God that have controlled the Christian Church in her 
 history reveal to us the Will of God, that life should never be 
 severed from the experience of missionary impulse. If at any 
 time in her history the Christian Church had forgotten her duty 
 to the world; if at any time the flames of missionary devotion 
 had burned low upon her altars, she has paid for it invariably 
 by alienation from Christ her Lord and by the dying down of 
 the tides of His life through her veins. And if at any time in 
 her history she has drawn close to Him once more, if the flames 
 of her love to Christ have blazed up again on the altar, in¬ 
 variably that nearness to Him has expressed itself in a fresh out¬ 
 go of love for the whole world, in a fresh devotion to the great 
 purposes of Christ, to bring in those other sheep not of that 
 
MISSIONS IN THE THOUGHT OF GOD 
 
 9 
 
 Jewish fold, that there might be one flock and one Shepherd. 
 
 In a little book on “Asia and Europe,” one of the most 
 suggestive and one of the most misleading books of our day, 
 Mr. Meredith Townsend, the successor of Mr. Hutton, the 
 editor of the London “Spectator,” has said, that while he be¬ 
 lieves the missionary duty is a great duty, yet it is a perfectly 
 futile duty, that we would never succeed in converting any 
 large number of these masses, that the great multitudes of them 
 
 will stop when they die, and there will be nothing more of them 
 
 ✓ 
 
 in this world or the world to come. But futile and vain as he 
 believes the duty to be, it is duty, and the Christian Church 
 should go out in obedience to the missionary impulse, and no 
 Christian Church unless it is a mockery of a Christian Church 
 can fall away from this purpose. We cannot understand the 
 history of the Christian Church as we look back over the nine¬ 
 teen centuries through which it has come save as we see in that 
 history a clear revelation of the purpose of it to bless the Church 
 that falls in line with a missionary purpose and to curse the 
 Church that denies Him by denying His character of love for 
 all mankind. 
 
 And it is not alone the history of the Christian Church 
 that is unintelligible to us save as we perceive the place which 
 this missionary enterprise fills in the thought of God. I do 
 not believe that we can understand what we speak of as secular 
 history—which, of course, in our eyes has no existence at all 
 —I don’t believe that we can understand what we speak of 
 as secular history except in the light of this great conception of 
 the place of missions in the thought of God. Take such a 
 great movement of the last century, to serve as a concrete illus- 
 
10 
 
 MISSIONS IN THE THOUGHT OF GOD 
 
 tration of what I mean, as the Taiping rebellion. 1 hat was 
 the greatest thing that happened in the nineteenth century so far 
 as illustrating the upheaval of great institutions is concerned. 
 1 he eyes of the world were hxed on other things, on the 
 wretched Crimean war, on our Civil strife, on the changes in the 
 development of Africa, on the throes out of which South 
 American republics were growing. Men had little thought of 
 what was going on among the four hundred millions of people 
 in China, but there was a great upheaval that resulted in the 
 death of thirty millions of our fellow human creatures, in the 
 destruction perhaps of billions of dollars of wealth, and in the 
 annihilation of organized government in large parts of half 
 of the provinces of the Chinese Empire, and in the practical ob¬ 
 literation of India wherever its influence had extended. But 
 no man will ever understand it who does not understand it in 
 the light of what God is doing in the world to get His great 
 missionary thought realized. 1 hat great upheaval, the great¬ 
 est upheaval in human history I suppose, all sprang out of a 
 bundle of simple Christian tracts dropped in the responsive 
 mind of a Chinese who came down to take his competitive ex¬ 
 aminations in the last century in Canton. He was met by an 
 old gray haired disciple of Robert Morrison, who carried in his 
 hands some little tracts. The young man took them to his home 
 in his country, and some years after he read them and found 
 confirmation of some great visions that had come to him, and 
 he started out with the imagination that the Christian God had 
 commissioned him to become Emperor of China, and to de¬ 
 stroy idolatry and the opium traffic in the whole of the Chinese 
 Empire, and if it had not been for the interference of “Chinese 
 
MISSIONS IN THE THOUGHT OF GOD 
 
 11 
 
 Gordon” the Taiping rebellion might have prevailed. But no 
 man will ever understand that great movement who does not 
 understand it in its relationship to that steady activity of the 
 Spirit of God in the world trying to get His missionary purpose 
 realized and fulfilled. 
 
 And in the great occurrences of our own time, what is 
 the meaning of these upheavals that have come upon us in the 
 far East? Do they have significance merely in Russian po¬ 
 litical history? Are they of interest to the world only as they 
 bear on Japanese political institutions? The strife in the East 
 is of no larger significance in human history save as it bears on 
 great spiritual ends, as it is some real way an unfolding of God’s 
 great purpose, and another step toward the establishment here 
 on earth of His kingdom that shall embrace all mankind. We 
 look out in the world in which we live and back on the world 
 in which our fathers lived, and it all speaks to us with just a 
 clear and unmistakable voice of God’s interest in all humanity 
 and God’s tireless insistence that all His children throughout 
 the whole world should be brought home again at last and 
 sheltered in His love and the security of His kingdom. 
 
 And now, at last, we can come back on a basis like this 
 to think of the blessing which God has poured out on the 
 missionary enterprise, realizing that our enterprise is grounded 
 not on its failures or on its successes, that it rests on the great 
 character of God and the manifestations of that character in 
 His revelation of it in human history. 
 
 Think for a moment of the way in which he has gone 
 beyond all that we have done, acting Himself far beyond the 
 limits of our utmost activities, touching human hearts that we 
 
12 
 
 MISSIONS IN THE THOUGHT OF GOD 
 
 have scarcely touched save as we have just dropped a seed there 
 in the ground to be cared for and nourished and brought to its 
 fruition by Him. 
 
 I cannot think of any more vivid illustration of what I 
 have in mind than the story Lord Radstock gave in the London 
 Times this last summer with reference to the triumphant suc¬ 
 cess of Christian missions in India. He was speaking of the 
 great transformation in India since he himself had gone there 
 thirty years before. And he cited one instance of the way in 
 which far beyond the knowledge of any man, God was work¬ 
 ing to secure the conversion of Swami Abhedananda. Seven 
 years ago he was in Delhi and heard an Englishman speaking 
 and he just caught the words, “I am the true Vine.” That 
 awakened in the breast of that Hindoo devotee an idea of the 
 possibilities of the communicated life. He carried around on 
 his body a little amulet filled with the dust from the three hun¬ 
 dred sacred Hindoo places. No missionary talked with him, 
 nobody knew what was going on in that Hindoo devotee’s 
 heart, but that single sentence began to work the story of the 
 divine life in that man’s soul. He visited the Armenians and 
 he went to Rome that he might study Mohammedanism and 
 Christianity, he went to China and Japan to study Confucian¬ 
 ism and Buddhism, and after seventeen years of wandering he 
 came back to Bengal to profess his belief in the Bible as the 
 word of God and Jesus Christ the Son of God as the only 
 Saviour of mankind. He has not connected himself with any 
 Christian Church. You and I would find very much unsatis¬ 
 factory in his Christian opinions, but the love of God had struck 
 into that Hindoo soul beyond any power of ours. The life of 
 
MISSIONS IN THE THOUGHT OF GOD 
 
 13 
 
 God has worked in that single life as it is working in many 
 little children and men and women in Asia. No missionary 
 has visited them, but the love of God that is in the world has 
 struck its roots deep in these countries, and beyond any touch 
 of our influence is doing the great work of transforming the 
 kingdoms. 
 
 Mr. Cleland was referring to the grand momentum of the 
 missionary activities of the early Church. We are just be¬ 
 ginning to feel now at the dawn of this new century the great 
 heave and surge of the missionary activities of the past. The 
 last census of India shows a population that in the decade end¬ 
 ing 1901 has increased three per cent, over the whole of India, 
 but the Hindoo population had decreased about one-third of 
 one per cent., the Mohammedan population had increased nine 
 per cent., and the Christian population increased twenty-seven 
 per cent., and the Protestant Christian population has increased 
 thirty per cent. I remember hearing Bishop Moule of Hang 
 Chow of the Church of England saying that when he first came 
 to China fifty years ago there were only fifty Protestant Chris¬ 
 tians in the whole of the Chinese Empire, not a single Protestant 
 Christian in Japan, in Korea, in the Laos states or in Siam, 
 and in his lifetime he had seen the Christian Church in Japan 
 grow from nothing to more than forty thousand; in Korea from 
 nothing to more than ten thousand; and the Protestant popula¬ 
 tion of China grew from that little handful of fifty when he 
 went there to more than a hundred and twenty thousand when 
 the devastation of the Boxer uprising swept across the empire. 
 There are many here this evening who will live to see the people 
 of Asia coming every year by the hundred thousand into the 
 Christian Church. 
 
14 
 
 MISSIONS IN THE THOUGHT OF GOD 
 
 Far beyond any power we have put forth, the loving 
 power of God has wrought through these small companies of 
 ours, these five loaves and a few small fishes that we have 
 brought for His use. 
 
 We look out over the world where all we see in it of the 
 activities and blessing of God convinces us that the first thing 
 in the thought of God is the end that He had in view when “He 
 so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that * 
 whosoever believeth on Him might not perish but have ever¬ 
 lasting life,” when He sent forth His Son, “not to condemn, 
 but to save the whole world.” 
 
 So friends, if the missionary enterprise has this place in the 
 thought of God, will we not ask ourselves whether it holds any 
 corresponding place in our lives? Shall that be second with 
 us which was first with God? Shall that for which God gave 
 up His Son make no appeal to us that we should give up our 
 sons, and that for which Jesus Christ gave up His life strike 
 no such chord in our hearts as shall call upon us to give up our 
 lives for Him? What ought the individual life to think of that 
 of which God thought so much? If the missionary enterprise 
 is first in the thought of God, ought it not to be the first in our 
 own thoughts and lives? Is it the first in our lives? I speak 
 to you men here this evening, is the missionary enterprise the first 
 business in your life? Does it have a place above your own 
 business by which you earn your living? Does it have a place 
 in your affections beyond any of your personal cares or con¬ 
 cerns? If this thing is first with God, and we believe in God, 
 must this thing not be first with us, God’s sons? 
 
 There is a passage in Blaikie’s personal life of Living¬ 
 stone in which he has pictured that last night before he went 
 
MISSIONS IN THE THOUGHT OF GOD 
 
 15' 
 
 out from his Scotch home to his great work in Africa. He 
 says all that last night Livingstone and his father sat up talk¬ 
 ing. Midnight came and still the old man and his son sat side 
 by side and the hours ran on until the morning of the day on 
 which David Livingstone was to sail from his home to Africa. 
 And the one subject of their conversation that night as they sat 
 there in that humble Scotch home was the prospect of the com¬ 
 ing of the day when man would look for the coming of the 
 Kingdom of God, and they agreed that the day would come 
 when men would live to make money for the Kingdom of God, 
 when there would be Christian men who would support mis¬ 
 sionaries and even entire mission stations. Has that day come 
 in the lives of the men of this church? If we believe in God, 
 and the men of this church do believe in God, ought not the 
 missionary enterprise to have practically in our lives the place 
 that it has in the thought of God? And if it has that place in 
 His thoughts and in His care, and in His family life, then 
 ought it not to have that place in our family lives? 
 
 Think of what the missionary enterprise called forth from 
 the family life of God, how the dearest sacrifice this world ever 
 saw was made in the bosom of God in behalf of the evangeli¬ 
 zation of the world. If God gave up His only Son that He 
 might go out as a missionary to the unevangelized, to preach 
 the Gospel of God to the children of God, should you and I 
 be reluctant to yield up the dearest that we possess? Should 
 not the missionary enterprise be the first thing in our home? Is 
 it, my friends? Do we talk about it around our firesides? Do 
 we make it the subject of conversation with our children? Do 
 our little children instinctively pray for the whole world and 
 
16 
 
 MISSIONS IN THE THOUGHT OF GOD 
 
 the little children on the other side of the world? Believe me, 
 if we believed in God as we say we believe in Him, and realized 
 that the chief concern of God is that His world might be 
 brought back again to Him, we should feel as eager to achieve 
 it as He felt eager to achieve it when he yielded up His Son. 
 
 I know what men say when the missionary obligation is 
 pressed home on them in this broad way. They say if you 
 speak of missions in that way you are simply using “missions” 
 as though the word were synonymous with Christian activity. 
 You have no right to focus on the evangelization of the heathen 
 world the entire missionary love of God. But what a simple 
 device it is on our part for holding to the theory of a God of 
 all mankind while we pull Him down to be a little racial God, 
 which is all He is to most of us, an Anglo-Saxon God, 
 an American God, a European God, no God of all mankind. 
 If we believed in Him as the God of all mankind we should 
 be driven by that very conception of him to go with our Gospel 
 to all mankind and to deem no single human soul dearer to Him 
 than any other human soul, and every human soul entitled to 
 the Gospel on the same grounds which entitle us to it, and need¬ 
 ing the Gospel on the same terms as we need the Gospel. No 
 consideration gives men the Gospel or makes the Gospel of any 
 worth to men that does not lay man under the obligation to 
 give that Gospel to all mankind. We have it on terms that 
 make it the property of every human soul. We have it be¬ 
 cause it is the Gospel of a God who loved the whole world 
 and whose child every child of man is. And I am no true 
 child of His nor any true member of the Church that bears the 
 name of His Son if I do not live in obedience to the same great 
 
MISSIONS IN THE THOUGHT OF GOD 
 
 17 
 
 passion that swayed him in desiring to see the ideals of His 
 heart, realized in the coming of His kingdom throughout the 
 whole world. There never yet has been any branch of the 
 Christian Church that rose to the level of this great conception. 
 
 Once a Christian Church arose resolved to achieve this 
 thing, there is no power on earth that could stay it. With 
 God acting with it, fulfilling the specific mission God set for 
 it, there is no power on earth that would stay it in its course. 
 If the Christian Church throughout the whole world only would 
 live by the faith that she professes .to believe we could make 
 this whole world God’s in fact as it is God’s in truth, before 
 the generation to which we belong had passed away to render 
 its account to Him. Oh my friends, what unbelief, what cold¬ 
 ness of heart, what attachment to evil, keeps us back from our 
 glorious duty and our splendid privilege. You remember the 
 word of Keshub Chunder Sen. He did not see very clearly 
 the face of Jesus Christ on which we have looked. He had 
 touched only the distant border of his garment, and you recall 
 the words he spoke in the last of all those strange addresses of 
 his before the collapse that came at the end. “None but Jesus, 
 none but Jesus, none but Jesus is worthy to wear the diadem of 
 India, and He shall have it.” And if none but Jesus is worthy 
 to wear the diadem of India who but Jesus is worthy to wear 
 the diadem of Egypt or of South America, or of China, or of 
 the islands of the sea? Shall He have it, shall He have it? 
 My friends, let us do our best to get it for Him, and when we 
 have got it let us lay it down upon His brow, the brow of the 
 Saviour of all mankind, and cover with its glory forever the 
 scars of that crown of thorns which He won in seeking to save 
 the whole round world. 
 

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