They will assuredly have a voice in determining the moral, social, and economical conditions of the future. The ethnic faiths of heathen lands have demonstrated

their supineness and weakness. From them nothing is to be expected of good, and they have not virility enough to interpose an effective barrier in the path of the gospel. They cannot, in the nature of things, exert a molding potency on the age soon to be born in the Orient. Their day is past. They have no to-morrow. Christianity is their God-ordained successor. It will survive when they have perished, and it will pursue its benignant mission through the lands long blighted by their supremacy. And as these lands emerge from darkness and desolation the instrumentality of Christianity will be recognized in their illumination and deliverance, and as they take their places side by side with European nations and begin to bear their part in shaping the destinies of mankind, a telling demonstration will be furnished of its supreme influence on a hundred years of history.

Referring to God's ancient people, Stade writes: "The history of Israel is essentially a history of religious ideas"; and, while I cannot say quite as much of the immediate past, still their unique and perennial power must be acknowledged. They shine perpetually like stars in the overarching skies of human affairs, and brighten the path of men and of nations. None of us can be quite satisfied with all their movements, combinations, and practical emanations; nevertheless, on the whole, they have achieved wonderfully and propitiously. They have been shaping themselves more and more into a kind of austral cross, the gleaming prognostic of a southern

day. The relation of Christianity to a century of his tory is not discouraging, but rather otherwise. It has presented the phenomenon of a religion, not always officially or by the direct planning and scheming of its dignitaries and representatives, working itself into the tumultuous events and revolutionary changes of the times; and doing so often in the face of the most desperate opposition, and in such a way as frequently to modify or transform their character. In this manner it has come to reveal itself more clearly as an independent force, like the wind, to which in a sense our Lord compared it, blowing whither it listeth, and bearing in its breath the life-giving airs of paradise. Being thus free to assert itself, and, while acting on man and through man, seeking its final development in man, being enlarged on its divine side, it has been able, and is yet able, to control, order, and time all things in the interest of Christ and his kingdom. This is the conviction that grows upon us from the review of the last hundred years. And as we look back the evidence accumulates that all movements are accordingly tending toward a consummation when, as Sir Edwin Arnold sings:

High as the herald star which fades in floods
Of silver, warming into pale gold, caught
By topmost clouds, and flowing on their rims
To fervent glow, flushed from the brink
With saffron, scarlet, crimson, amethyst :
Whereat the sky burns splendid to the blue,
And, robed in raiment of glad light, the King
Of light and glory cometh.

XI

THE OBSTRUCTIONS AND OPPOSITIONS

Yet this is He of whom we made our boast,
Who lit the Fiery Pillar in our path,

Who swept the Red Sea dry before our feet,
Who in his jealousy smote kings, and hath
Sworn once to David: One shall fill thy seat
Born of thy body, as the sun and moon
'Stablished for aye in sovereignty complete.
O Lord, remember David, and that soon.
The glory hath departed, Ichabod !

Yet now, before our sun grow dark at noon,
Before we come to nought beneath thy rod,

Before we go down quick into the pit,
Remember us for good, O God, our God.

-Christina Rossetti.

But all things shall be ours! Up, heart, and sing.
All things were made for us-we are God's heirs
Up from thy depths in me, my child-heart bring—
The child alone inherits anything:

God's little children gods-all things are theirs.

-George Macdonald.

XI

THE LIMITATIONS OF CHURCH SUCCESS IN THE NINE

TEENTH CENTURY

THE impression has been zealously propagated that the transit of time from the nineteenth century to the twentieth is being ominously marked by the increasing debility and decay of Christianity. This alleged condition of spiritual senility and decrepitude has been hailed with every token of satisfaction by one section of society, and has been equally lamented by the other. They alike have been so infatuated and bewildered by the triumphant shouts of the foes of Christianity, and by the despairing wails of her faint-hearted friends, that they have in common quite overlooked the signs of her strength and the evidences of her successes, with which these pages have made us somewhat familiar, and have never taken pains to ascertain the measure of what they regard as failure, or to account for it on rational principles. In this respect they have acted with less discrimination than they have shown when startled by complaints of disappointing results in other departments of thought and activity; for it should never be forgotten that the religion of the Cross is not the only great cause which has come short of the promises made and the expectations excited by its character and earlier conquests.

Professor Bryce has pointed out with great clearness, that though the past hundred years have been most