knowledge, their initial promptings, the environment or atmosphere, which made them all sensitive and ready to receive the Christian truth when it came in its full form from the living missionary and the vital word of God.  Some one has well said that the languages of modern Europe are nothing more than Christianity expressed with differing pronunciation and vocabulary.  To him who will receive it, the mastery of any one of the languages of Christendom, is, in a large sense, a revelation of God in Christ Jesus.

Seekers after God.

Pathetic, even to the compulsion of tears, is the story of these seekers after God.  We, who to-day are surrounded by every motive and inducement to Christian living and by every means and appliance for the practice of the Christian life, may well consider for a moment the struggle of earnest souls to find out God.  Think of this one who finds a Latin Bible cast up on the shore from some broken ship, and bearing it secretly in his bosom to the Hollander, gains light as to the meaning of its message.  Think of the nobleman, Watanabe Oboru,[16] who, by means of the Japanese interpreter of Dutch, Takano Choyei, is thrilled with the story of Jesus of Nazareth who helped and healed and spake as no other man spake, teaching with an authority above that of the masters Confucius or Buddha.  Think of the daimi[=o] of Mito,[17] who, proud in lineage, learned and scholarly, and surrounded by a host of educated men, is yet unsatisfied with what the wise of his own country could give him, and gathers around him the relics unearthed from the old persecutions.  From a picture of the Virgin, a fragment of a litany, or it may be a part of a breviary, he tries to make out what Christianity is.

Think of Yokoi Heishiro,[18] learned in Confucius and his commentators, who seeks better light, sends to China for a Chinese translation of the New Testament, and in his lectures on the Confucian ethics, to the delight and yet to the surprise of his hearers who hear grander truth than they are able to find in text or commentary, really preaches Christ, and prophesies that the time will come when the walls of isolation being levelled, the brightest intellects of Japan will welcome this same Jesus and His doctrine.  Think of him again, when unable to purify the Augean stables of Yedo’s moral corruption, because the time was at hand for other cleansing agencies, he retires to his home, content awhile with his books and flowers.  Again, see him summoned to the capital, to sit at Ki[=o]to—­like aged Franklin among the young statesmen of the Constitution in Philadelphia—­with the Mikado’s youthful advisers in the new government of 1868.  Think of him pleading for the elevation of the pariah Eta, accursed and outcast through Buddhism, to humanity and citizenship.  Then hear him urge eloquently the right of personal belief, and argue for toleration under the law, of opinions, which the Japanese then stigmatized as “evil” and