The largest, grandest word in the title of this organization is “Missionary.”  When that word drops out its work will be done, for its call will have ceased.  Our ultimate end and present purpose is, and always should be, simply this—­to save.  We cannot lift our fallen brother without the leverage of the cross.

No field is wider, none more difficult, than that to which our eyes are turned, embracing as it does four of the five families of mankind.  They huddle together in the lap of Christendom, but feel no warmth.  They are a demonstration of the fact that civilization never touches barbarism without polluting it.  The Indian, finding his highest ideal in the rude and tipsy defender of our flag; the Chinaman, taking home more heathenism than he brings; the Negro, bound tighter by the vices of the whites than ever he was by their iron chains—­these three, ignorant of the Christ and grasping the satanic weaponry of our sinful land and age, together form the most discouraging of mission fields.  Our laborers are faced by all the serious problems of the foreign land—­problems unrelieved by a single romantic charm.  When we send our missionaries to Africa they go to labor among the Africans; and when we send them down South they go to teach “niggers.”

Notice, then, what the report of this committee signifies in the presence of the fact that our laborers not only grapple with foreign languages, conceptions, idolatries, habits of benighted peoples, but all the time are hindered and assailed on every hand by these Bedouin Arabs of our land—­the minions of mammon and the slaves of caste.  To gather and hold and save in such a field as this, is task enough for the finest corps in the army of the Lord.

In the presence of these well-known facts, the report of the committee adds another chapter to the Book of Acts.  It gladdens our hearts with thrilling music—­the music of ringing sickle and reaper’s song.  From all over this mighty field, from mountain, and savannah, and shore, and plain, we hear the resonant footsteps of advancing troops—­a solid regiment of converts marching in the army of our Christ and into the fellowship of his Congregational Church.  I want you to notice that this church which we have planted in the South is just the kind of a church to take these people and assimilate them, to save them and to preserve them to their highest usefulness.  And why?  In the first place, because it is a church that will take them in.  I saw the other day this inscription over a great arch erected in honor of our Pan-American guests in the city of Cleveland, “Welcome All Americans.”  Well, the Congregational Church has put three talismanic letters over the portal of every church that it has planted in the South and in the West, “A.M.A.—­All mankind acceptable.”