These conditions are softened in intensity by the commonly recognized moral standards of life.  But they are there.  The man immersed in mission service in any of these cities is apt to think that there can be no greater nor sorer need than this that pushes itself insistently upon him at every turn.

The slum ends and sides of our Christian cities and huge heathendom, jostle elbows in the likeness of their moral conditions.  The need is everywhere, crying earnestly, wretchedly out to us.  There is good mission ground anywhere you please to strike in.

But—­but, by far the greatest need, with that word “greatest” intensified beyond all power of description, is in the heathen lands.  The vastness of the numbers there, the utter ignorance, the smallness of their chance of getting any of the knowledge and uplift of the Gospel, all go to spell out that word “greatest.”  The awful cumulative power of sin, unchecked by the common moral standards of life, with the terrific momentum of centuries; the common temptations known to us, but with a fierceness and subtlety wholly unknown to us in Christian lands—­and yet how terrifically fierce and cunningly subtle some of us know them to be!—­these all make every letter in that word “greatest” stand out in biggest capitals, and in blackest, inkiest ink.

Groping in the Dark.

That is a bare suggestion of the need of the world in bulk.  But we want to get a much closer look than that.  These are men that we are talking about; our brothers, not merely hard, unfeeling, statistical totals of millions.  Each man of them contains the whole pitiable picture of the sore need of the world vividly portrayed in himself.

The very heathen religions themselves are the crying out, in the night, of men’s hearts, after something they haven’t, and yet need so much.  Strange things these heathen superstitions and monstrous practices and beliefs called religions!  It has been rather the thing of late to speak somewhat respectfully of them, and rather apologetically.  They have even been praised, so strangely do things get mixed up in this world of ours.  It has been supposed that God was revealing Himself in these religions; and that in them men were reaching up to God, and could reach up to Him through them.

They really are the twilight remnants of the clear direct light of God that once lightened all men; but so mixed through, and covered up with error and superstition and unnatural devilish lust, that they are wholly inadequate to lead any man back home to God.  In almost all of them there is indeed some distinct kernel of truth.  But that kernel has been invariably shut up in a shell and bur that are hard beyond any power of cracking, to get at the kernel of truth for practical help, even if the people knew enough to try.

They tell pathetically of the groping of man’s heart after God.  But the groping is in the pitch dark, and amid a mass of foul, filthy cobwebs that blind the eyes with their dust, and grime all the life.  I have no doubt that untold numbers of true hearts in heathen lands are feeling after God, and in some dim way coming into touch with Him.  He is not far from any one of them; but they find Him chiefly in spite of these religions, rather than through any help found in them.