of the disciples; and by so much as men are more hungered—­if there be one nation more so than another—­by so much as they are nearer to starving for the bread of life, by so much the more are your heart and my heart called upon in the name and in the sympathy of Jesus Christ, to respond to that cause.  Those disciples of that early day might just as well have said, “Master, we can not feed all these ten thousand.  We will pick out those around us, the nearest at hand.  We won’t touch that set of lepers just over there from Capernaum; we won’t have anything to do with that other set of outcasts and vagabonds drifted in here, some of them from Samaria; we will have nothing whatever to do with these wretches from Chorazin—­gamblers and abandoned people of every sort.”

What do you think would have been his response to that sort of argument?  I think if Peter had given him any such plea as that it would have cut him off hopelessly from any apostleship.  There would have been a new band of apostles that would have been instituted then and there that were willing to take the Master’s command, take Him as responsible for the authority and for the result.  They knew better; they knew Him better; and though they had their little scant loaves that would not give a quarter of a crumb apiece to the great multitude, they said:  “That is not our responsibility; ours is to obey.  It is His to furnish when the resources fail.”  Brethren, that is my theory of missions.

Do you remember the little anecdote about Francis Xavier, that before he went abroad as a missionary to China, while he was sleeping with his room-mate one night, he startled him by rising in his sleep and throwing out his arms with great urgency, as he said, “Yet more, oh, my God, yet more!” His comrade wakened him and asked him what he meant.  “Why,” said he, “I was having a vision of things in the East.  I was seeing missionaries tortured; some of them were being burned, some of them were having their flesh torn from their bodies, and in many ways they seemed to be suffering in their testimony for Christ’s sake.  And as I looked, the tears came to my eyes, and a voice said to me, ’That is what it will cost you if you go on this missionary tour.  Are you willing to take the cost?’ And I said, ’Oh, Lord Jesus; yet more, yet more, if I may win these perishing souls.’”

Brethren, it is the call of the hour.  These people may become, in my judgment, pre-eminently the missionary people.  They have been called the Yankees of the Orient.  They are scattered every whither, in every quarter of the world.  I think it ought to shame us to have less enthusiasm for these for whom Christ died than they of the Romish church in the palmiest days of its missionary zeal.  God help us that we may stand true upon the Pacific coast and all through our land, and that for every missionary church abroad there may be a score and a hundred.  Dr. Williams said, after thirty years’ knowledge of the Chinese, that we might evangelize China from one end of the empire to the other in half a century if we were in earnest.  God help us that we may labor and pray for the coming of such a day.