The story is told of a Chinese tailor who had struggled hopelessly for light, and had finally found it in finding Jesus.  He put his idea of the heathen religions that he knew, and had tried, in this simple vivid way: 

“A man had fallen into a deep, dark pit, and lay in its miry bottom, groaning and utterly unable to move.  He heard a man walking by close enough to see his plight.  But with stately tread he walked on without volunteering to help.  That is Mohammedanism.

“Confucius walking by approached the edge of the pit, and said, ’Poor fellow!  I am sorry for you.  Why were you such a fool as to get in there?  Let me give you a piece of advice:  If ever you get out, don’t get in again.’  ‘I can’t get out,’ said the man.  That is Confucianism.

“A Buddhist priest next came by and said:  ’Poor fellow!  I am very much pained to see you there.  I think if you could scramble up two-thirds of the way, or even half, I could reach you and lift you up the rest.’  But the man in the pit was entirely helpless and unable to rise.  That is Buddhism.

“Next the Saviour came by, and, hearing his cries, went to the very brink of the pit, stretched down and laid hold of the poor man, brought him up, and said, ‘Go, sin no more.’  This is Christianity.”

The awful moral or immoral conditions prevalent throughout the heathen world are the most graphic comment on the influence of these religions.  It can be said thoughtfully that, instead of ever helping up to God and the light, they drag down to the devil and to black darkness.  There is not only an utter lack of any moral uplift in them, but a deadly downward pull.  The very things called religions point out piteously the terrible need of these peoples.

Living Messages of Jesus.

Now, what is it that these people need, and that we can give to them?  May I first remind you what they don’t need?  Well, let it be said as plainly as it can be that they don’t need the transferring to heathen soil of our Western church systems, nor our schemes of organizations.  It is not our Western creeds and theology that they stand in need of.

Of course, there need to be both churches and organizations.  Only so will the work be done, and what is gotten held together.  But these are in themselves temporary.  They are immensely important and indispensable, but not the chief thing.  The great need is of the story of Jesus.  That is, plain teaching about sin—­the hardest task of all for the missionary, whether in Asia or America—­and the damnable results locked up in sin.  Then the winsome telling, the tirelessly patient and persistently gentle telling of the story of love, God’s love as revealed in Jesus.  The telling them that Jesus will put a new moral power inside a man that will make him over new.

But they need even more than this, aye, far more.  They need men—­human beings like themselves, living among them in closest touch—­whose clean, strong, sweet lives spell out the Jesus-story as no human lips can ever tell it.