My friends, we are going right forward in the field of conflict, which is the field of victory.  One with God is a majority, and we are thousands with God.  And we have on our side the weak and the helpless, too.  I don’t want any better aid than that.  You know that Burke in that magnificent invective against Warren Hastings, when he rose to the very climax of it and told the story of those atrocious tortures to which the poor and ignorant and misguided peasants of India had been put, how they had had their fingers tied together and mashed with hammers, and other unmentionable things had been done to them, appealed to the parliament and said that if they should refuse justice those mashed and disabled hands, lifted high to Heaven in prayer, would call down the power of God for their deliverance.  Is it not worse to mash and disable a mind and a soul than a hand?  I tell you the prayers of the poor are on our side; and if we had nothing of all this magnificent achievement of this Association to look upon, we could look on those hands raised and those souls crying out from the social bondage of to-day, as they did from the physical bondage of a few years ago, and know that if God be for us we need not care who or what is against us.

* * * * *

ADDRESS OF PROFESSOR GRAHAM TAYLOR.

I have but a very few words to add to this report.  The facts speak louder than any statement of them can.  When skirting the Asiatic shore of the inner sea, that lonely traveler, Paul, heard a voice, he looked across to the shores of Europe, and there in the night stood a great colossal form, not of a naked savage, but a form clad perhaps, in the panoply of the Macedonian phalanx, the representative of the Europe that then was and was yet to be, the precursor, it may be, to the classically informed mind of the missionary to the Gentiles, of that long procession of great world conquerors.  It was the Man of Macedon who stood there in the might of his strength and cried, like the crying of an infant in the night, the crying of an infant for the light, “Come:  come over into Macedonia and help us.”

Now, my brethren, this was the cry of the strong for help.  This was the cry of the peoples that were following the westward course of the star of empire.  And yet, in their strength, they cried as though they were the weakest of woman born.  And when that missionary, in response to that call, crossed the sea, though he came to that Macedonian city which had been the battle-scene of the contending forces of the Roman empire, he found access for the gospel into Europe through the open heart of one woman—­Lydia, a seller of purple.  And there, sitting down by the water course, where prayer was wont to be made, he just grouped those individuals into that unit of God’s operations on the face of the earth, the local church.  And this church was distinguished among the apostolic churches for its family traits, for the infusion of feminine grace and masculine strength, for the most domestic hospitality and the very faults of the close attritions of human life.  There he planted the seed which has grown into our European and American civilization and Christianity.