The reactionary effect of this peculiar form of home-foreign mission work upon the Christian character and culture of our own people is of importance; of too much importance for it to be either safe or wise for us to neglect it.  Suppose this work were to be neglected, this duty ignored, this clear providential summons slighted, what a mockery it would be of our professed zeal for foreign missions.  The spectacle of what the Society is doing for the Chinese, especially of what it ought to have the power and the commission given it to do, is fitted to be peculiarly impressive, as an object lesson, to the nation.  The radical character of a nation comes out in no other way so distinctively, as in the way it treats its weakest and most helpless subjects.

A grand part of the good done by the American Missionary Association has been in its influence, first on the conscience of the churches, and then, through this, on the moral sense and the moral sentiments of the nation itself.  This has been the case as regards the nation’s treatment of the emancipated negroes.  It was this Society which, so promptly and gloriously, lifted up and bore aloft with something of a divine intrepidity, God’s own banner of human rights and the divine sympathy.  It is this Society which has done more than any other one agency, to revolutionize and harmonize the national sentiment as regards the rights of the Indian to civilization and to Christianization.  If now the churches of our country will hasten to do their duty, as in sight of him who is Father of us all, towards our Chinese neighbors, it will not be long before the National Government will wake to its shame and wipe off the deep disgrace of its recent demagogy and international perfidy.

Moreover, a more complete mistake could not be made than to imagine that the Imperial Government of China is unobservant, whatever the seeming invincibility of its pride and exclusiveness.  China is neither blind nor insensible.  Japan has awakened; China is wakening.  Its hour is at hand; the dust of ages is stirring.  The Chinese wall is vanishing.  The Supreme Government of the four hundred millions of the Empire is at length getting in touch with the other great and advancing Powers of the world.  And the startling sublime fact of the new world sociability, if we will but see it, is giving tremendous urgency to every possible means of originating, multiplying, communicating, and sending on and around from nation to nation, the forces of the world-redeeming Gospel of Jesus Christ.  We, therefore, are most earnestly agreed in the conviction that, not only is the noble work of missions among the Chinese in our country, now being done by this Society, of inestimable value, but that it ought by all means to be greatly and immediately enlarged and re-enforced.