Having glanced at some of the evils attendant on Western life, I must hasten to indicate what class of men should come to the West.  The poor of our cities, whose poverty becomes the more haggard by being placed in immediate proximity to measureless profusion, luxury and extravagance—­respectable people, whose whole life is a lifelong struggle to keep up appearances, and in whom the securing of affluence is like putting on a corpse the frippery and finery of the ball-room; young men with brave hearts and willing hands—­these are the classes that may come, and should come, to the West.  And if Adam, realizing that the world is all before him, where to choose, looks to the West to find his Eden, I would respectfully suggest that he has an infirmity in his left side, and that his best security against the perils of a pioneer life is to take to himself the rib that is wanting.

The tenant, living on the farm of another man, should come to the West.  He can not plant a tree and call it his own.  God gave the whole world to Adam and his sons, and the true dignity of every son of Adam requires that he should be able to stand in the midst of his own Eden and say:  “This, under God, is mine.”

There is yet another class of men that may always go to the West, or to any other place.  Whether young, or old, or middle-aged—­whether rich or poor—­they may go, and the blessings of God go with them.  These are the men whose hearts are full of faith, and hope, and love—­who sympathize with all, and who, consequently, will find friends among all—­who are willing to be missionaries of the cross, and to be pillars in the churches they have helped to nurture into life.

Kansas is full of men who were once members of our churches, but who are stranded on the rocks of apostasy, on whom the storms of life will beat yet a little while, and then they will sink down into ever-lasting ruin.  Strong drink, the love of money, or, perhaps, the inadequacy of their former teaching, is the occasion of their fall.  Others, scattered over this great wilderness of sin, remain faithful amidst abounding wickedness, and stretch out their hands and utter the Macedonian cry, “Come over and help us.”

The apostolic age was pre-eminently an age of missionary effort.  What will the world say of us, and of our confident, and, as some would say, arrogant, pretense to have restored primitive and apostolic Christianity, when our Israel in so large a part of the great West is such a moral wreck—­such a spectacle of scattered, abandoned, and, too often, ruined church members, unknown, untaught and uncared for.

The peerless glory of our Lord Jesus Christ—­his measureless, boundless and quenchless love—­this is the great center of attraction around which the affections of the Christian do continually gather.  The Lord is the center of the moral universe, and all its light is but the emanation of his glory.  He dwells in the human heart, and fills it with his love; he dwells in the family, and becomes its ornament as when he dwelt in the house of Lazarus; he dwells in the church, and makes it a fold in which he nurtures his lambs.