world,’ he expressed the consciousness of a great historic mission to the whole of humanity.  Yet it was a Nazarene carpenter speaking to a group of Nazarene peasants and fishermen.  Under the circumstances at that time it was an utterance of the most daring faith,—­faith in himself, faith in them, faith in what he was putting into them, faith in faith.  Jesus failed and was crucified, first his body by his enemies and then his spirit by his friends; but that failure was such an amazing success that to-day it takes an effort on our part to realize that it required any faith on his part to inaugurate the kingdom of God and to send out his apostolate.

“To-day, as Jesus looks out upon humanity, his spirit must leap to see the souls responsive to his call.  They are sown broadcast through humanity, legions of them.  The harvest field is no longer deserted.  All about us we hear the clang of the whetstone and the rush of the blades through the grain and the shout of the reapers.  With all our faults and our slothfulness, we modern men in many ways are more on a level with the mind of Jesus than any generation that has gone before.  If that first apostolate was able to remove mountains by faith, such an apostolate as Christ could now summon might change the face of the earth."[28]

The time is ripe for such an apostolate.  The old type of evangelism has plainly had its day.  Strenuous efforts are put forth to revive it, but their success is meagre.  It is easy by expending much money in advertising, by organizing a great choir, and employing the services of gifted and earnest men, to draw large congregations; but the great mass of those who attend these services are church members,—­the outside multitude is scarcely, touched by them.  Those who are gathered into the church in these meetings are mainly children from the Sunday schools.  There may be evangelists who, by an extravagant and grotesque sensationalism, contrive to get the attention of the non-churchgoers, and who are able to report considerable additions to the churches; but the permanence of these gains is not yet shown, and we have no means of enumerating the thousands who, by such clownish exhibitions, are driven in disgust from the churches.

The failure of the modern evangelism is not conjectural:  the year-books show it.  The growth of membership in several of our leading denominations has either ceased or is greatly retarded; the Sunday schools and the young people’s societies report decreasing numbers; the benevolent contributions are either waning, or increasing at a rate far less than that of the growth of wealth in the membership.  It is idle to blink these conditions; we must face them and find out what they mean.  This slackening and shrinkage is not a fact of long standing; it represents only the tendencies of the past twenty years.

We hear rather frantic demands for a return to the old methods of evangelism, but that is a foolish cry:—­