The fact is, God is in it.  He is crowding these heathen upon our churches in these missionary days of an opening world, first of all to prove our Christianity.  Do we believe that all men are brothers?  Do we believe that the Holy Ghost who renewed our hearts can renew these?  Do we believe that the Lord who died for us, died for the world?  Do we believe—­not that the world—­but that this particular heathen as he stands before us in his blue blouse, or sits at our side with his reading-book, is as dear to our heavenly Father as you and I are?  Do we believe that we are to go to him with the gospel to find a way for the truth into his heart, to bear his burdens, to win him by love, and that without him we ourselves can not be made perfect?  Do we believe, in short, that God has brought him here to our door that we might learn that if we have not a religion that will save, and will make us eager to have it save a Chinaman, we have not a religion that will save ourselves?

Seven hundred and fifty of these men already members of the churches connected with our mission on the Pacific Coast! and who will say how many more on the rolls of our churches from St. Louis to Boston!  What are these Chinese converts, the fruitage of our Sunday-schools and prayer-meetings, our personal labor, but God’s blessed seal set upon our Christian faith!  Here is the evidence.  Ours is the conquering faith of the world.  It will save every man, for it has saved these men, no less than you and me.

But this is not all.  China’s day has come.  We hear from beyond the sea of the new railway, the awful floods, the burning of the “Altar of Heaven,” and the strange stirrings of the mind of that mighty people, the oldest, and judged by its persistent life, the strongest now on the globe.  Merchants tell us of its limitless trade:  diplomatists speak of its astuteness and of its new navy, second only to that of England; scholars wonder at a nation of heathen with whom learning determines rank, and where the “boss” and the fixer of elections are unknown.  Missionaries write of the throngs that gather in strange cities to hear them preach, of the new gentleness and courtesy everywhere shown them, and of the increasing number of young people pressing into the mission schools.

In the midst of all this, when the Lord’s voice is heard calling us to lift up our eyes and look on the fields now white for the harvest, comes word from our solitary watchman upon the watch-tower in Hong-Kong that when he returned to his post, as he did last year, perplexed and down-hearted, because not one Christian in all America heeded his call and went with him to his field, to his surprise and joy the Lord has been preparing his own servants in the person of Chinese emigrants coming home from America, bringing with them not money only and knowledge of the wide world, but the new-found faith; graduates of laundries, but also of our Sunday-schools, members of our churches, filled with an eager spirit to tell their parents, their brethren, their neighbors, of Jesus Christ.  Ah, dear friends, God’s ways are not as our ways.  Let us not be slow to catch his thought and walk where he leads.