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J. CAMPBELL WHITE 
 
Union Biblical Seminary 
 
 AhhrtBBts bg 
 
 J. Campbell White, Dr. O. P. Gifford 
 and Dr. C. I. B. Brane 
 
 UNITED BRETHREN PUBLISHING HOUSE 
 Nineteen Hundred and Six Dayton, Ohio 
 
All Rights Reserved by 
 Ukiteu Brethren Publishing House 
 
 I90i) 
 
Bible Conference Addresses 
 
 SDvmins feierbice. 
 
 Thursday, May 3, 1906. 
 The opening session of the Bible Conference was held in the Summit Street 
 United Brethren Church, and after the singing of several songs and prayer, 
 J. Campbell White delivered the opening address, taking as the' basis of his 
 remarks Matt. 23:34-45; Matt. 24:31-46. 
 
 J. Campbell White's Opening Address. 
 
 This is the test which is to be applied to our lives finally. We are going to 
 taUv about methods during this conference. I believe it will, therefore, be 
 appropriate this evening to talk about the supreme test that is to be applied to 
 our lives finally. I cannot remember now who the writer is that thus describes 
 the spirit of neighborliness of which we have just read, but I want to 
 talk about that test here at the beginning of this conference. 
 
 What would you answer if I were to ask you. What is the greatest sin in the 
 world? If I were to get from each of you an answer to that question, I pre- 
 sume we would have a great deal of variety here to-night. Most of you would 
 probably put your finger down and say the breaking of this or that command- 
 ment is the greatest sin. I would like to refer you to the commaiidment we 
 read awhile ago, which is the reply of our Lord in answer to the question, 
 "Teacher, which is the greatest commandment of the law? And he said unto 
 him. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy. heart, and with all thy 
 soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And 
 the second is like unto it. Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these 
 hang the Avhole law and the ])rophets." If there is a first and greatest com- 
 mandment, must not the breaking of that commandment be the greatest sin? 
 It is possible to break the whole decalogue at once by failing to fulfill the obli- 
 gation laid on us by our Lord when he said, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy 
 God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul and with all thy mind, and thy 
 neighbor as thyself." The Lord would make sure that each one of us loves our 
 neighbor just as much as we do ourselves. Paul went a little further and 
 said in Galatians 5 :14, "For the whole law is fulfilled in one word, even in this: 
 Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." He seems for the moment to be out 
 of view of the commandment Jesus gave concerning love to God, and, as it 
 were, to forget it. 
 
 We wonder why Paul should speak not a single word concerning the obli- 
 gation of love to God, and should give only that one injunction, "Thou shalt 
 love thy neighbor as thyself"? But we shall see that this harmonizes in every 
 particular with the law laid down by our Lord, when we look into one of the 
 
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Union Biblical Seminary 
 
 epistles of John and read (I. John 4:20), "If a man say, I love God, and 
 hateth his brother, he is a liar : for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath 
 seen, cannot love God, whom he hath not seen." 
 
 So we must admit that the supreme test of love is neighborliness — the love 
 of our neighbor. It is the highest proof that we love God, and no man can 
 say that he knows him, or that he loves God, unless he in reality loves his 
 neighbor as himself. There is no higher obligation that can possibly be laid 
 upon man than this. It is the most searching test of character. Our Lord 
 said (John 13:35), "By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye 
 have love one to another." And he understood perfectly that no man had the 
 ability to do the thing unless he had learned to do it from Christ. 
 
 This love for one's neighbor is the greatest heart-throb of missions. No mis- 
 sionary has a harder task than to convince the heathen people to whom he 
 goes, than to convince them that he really loves them. Their question always 
 is, "What selfish motive must have led you to come here and say these things 
 to us ?" Their explanation was that we were hired agents of the government, 
 or had some idea of gain that they knew nothing about. They were convinced 
 that we had some selfish motive in coming out to them. 
 
 "By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to 
 another." And no man can have the true spirit of missions unless he has love 
 for his fellow-man. 
 
 "We know we have passed from death imto life because we love" — and no 
 man can know it who does not love. In that passage from John's great epistle 
 we come to the very heart of the matter. One reason why so many workers in 
 our churches do not accomplish more in the service of God is that they do not 
 know they have passed from death unto life. They do not know him who is 
 Love. "Hereby we know that we know him, when we keep his command- 
 ments." But the first of his commandments is this, "Thou shalt love God 
 supremely," and as a proof that you do so love God, you must show it by the 
 love you show to your neighbor; and unless we keep this commandment we 
 cannot know that we know him who is life, and love incarnate. 
 
 It is the final principle of judgment by which all of us are to be judged for 
 eternity, and upon which depends the approval of our Lord; whether we have 
 loved as he loves, whether we have seen them in need and helped them as he 
 would have done. It is a terrible standard, but it is the only right standard. 
 It is necessarily the right standard, because it proves our compliance with the 
 first obligation laid on us by our Lord. 
 
 Of course this must be a love like Christ's. "Even as I have loved you" — 
 what man of us can love like that ? It means that we must love the unlovable. 
 "God commended his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ 
 died for us." We cannot pick out a few nice people and love them and fulfill 
 this commandment. "God so loved the world" — the imlovable, unrighteous, 
 degraded world — ^that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever, however 
 unlovable they might be, should not perish, but have everlasting life. "Even 
 as I have loved you," Christ said. Only when the love of God is shed abroad 
 in our hearts by the Holy Spirit can we love like that. Our Lord lays on us 
 the same obligation that he lays on himself when he tells us to love our enemies 
 and to pray for them who despitefully use us and persecute us. 
 
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Bible Conference Addresses 
 
 Then there is no one in all the world toward whom we are not to show this 
 manner of love. If we show our love for God by the keeping of his command- 
 ments, we are to love our neighbor as ourselves, and that includes every one — 
 the most repulsive man or woman as well as the most attractive, for God's love 
 includes us all, and some of us are not particularly lovable. Do we love as he 
 loves ? Are we doing for the world what Christ would do ? Are we reincar- 
 nating his love, and having the same kind of passion for the lost that he had? 
 It is written of him that "when he saw the multitude, he was moved with 
 compassion toward them, because they were scattered as sheep without a shep- 
 herd." This love which he told us to have toward our fellow-men will lead us 
 to weep over them who are rejecting him. 
 
 Doctor Gordon said he was praying the Lord Jesus to have compassion on 
 a lost world, and he spoke to his conscience, "I have had compassion for a lost 
 world, and it is now for you to have a passion for them. I have given my 
 heart's blood for them ; give your heart to them and let them know of my love. 
 I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me." He can be lifted up only as 
 you and I do it in our lives. 
 
 Next I want to speak of the law of service. A love that does not serve can- 
 not be the genuine article. "By love serve one another." This is the great 
 divine command. In the passages that were read to-night, it was a love that 
 served; that described the kind of love — a love that will not be satisfied unless 
 it can be expressed by some service. "I am among you as he that serveth." 
 "The Son of man came, not to be ministered unto, but to minister." We have 
 got some multi-millionaires in some of our churches, whose hearts' ambition 
 seems to be to do nothing. I can think of nobody they remind me of so much 
 as certain barbarians we saw in Africa. These barbarians ranked in influence 
 and importance according to the number of wives they possessed, and they 
 made their women do the work, and they luxuriously rested. There are some 
 aristocratic barbarians in our own time. The Bible says, "Six days shalt thou 
 labor, and do all thy work, but the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy 
 God." The first part, telling us to work six days in the week, is quite as im- 
 portant as the last part, which tells us to "remember the seventh day to keep it 
 holy." I wish there was some way of enforcing that everywhere. God did not 
 intend work to be a curse to man ; it is a blessing. "He that provideth not for 
 his own household hath denied the faith and is worse than an infidel." "Let 
 him that stole, steal no more, but rather let him labor, working with his hands 
 the thing that is good, that he may have to give to him that needeth." 
 
 The idler is not a factor in the work of the world ; he is not a part of God's 
 plan. He is a cumberer of the ground. It is a law of nature that that which 
 lias no function — has no work to do — comes to naught. In the very nature of 
 things it nuist die, for it has no part to fulfill; it has no work to do. In the 
 eternal fitness of things, the idler must die. And let me say it is not merely 
 physical death I am taUiing about, either. He dies spiritually and intellec- 
 tually and socially, and all these have their effect upon his body also. There 
 are many dead people walking the streets of our cities to-day, because they are 
 idlers. We want no idlers here. God wants no idlers in this world of his. 
 Work is not a curse, but a blessing. God has been working all through the 
 centuries, and he expects that we, too, shall work ; the work he has for us is in 
 
Union Biblical Seminary 
 
 service to our fellow-men. In Ephesiaiis 2:10 wq have it clearly laid down 
 that God has a definite plan as to what every one of us is to do. "We are his 
 workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works." I want to make it 
 very plain that God has prepared a work for every one of us; that God has 
 as clear and definite a plan for your life and my life as he had for the life of 
 Christ; that he has as specific a work for us to do as he had for his own Son 
 to do; that your work and my work was prepared for us before we came into 
 the world. It is a work we are able to do, because it is "prepared" for us. God 
 intends us to be busy; we are to be "always abounding- in the work of the 
 Lord." 
 
 It is not possible for us to do more than God has planned. Hence we can- 
 not put the burden on another, nor can we do another's work. If any of us 
 fail to do the work God has prepared for us, that work goes undone, and we 
 must meet God and give him an account as to why we have not done the work 
 he had prepared for us to do. 
 
 If men would but do the work assigned them, they would be not only one 
 with Christ Jesus, but they also would be on an equality with God. "He 
 took upon him the form of a servant." The spirit of his life was the spirit of 
 doing God service. "I am among you as he that serveth." "The Son of man 
 came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom 
 for many." "I must work the works of him that sent me while it is day; the 
 night Cometh when no man can work." And when he was among the people 
 and he was so occupied that he could not eat, his friends sought to lay hold on 
 him, saying, "He is beside himself," and we hear him say, "My Father worketh 
 hitherto, and I work." And at the close of his life he was able to say, "Father, 
 I have kept in thy name those whom thou hast given me;" "I have given 
 them thy word;" "I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do." Is 
 that our highest ambition liere to-night ? Service is the only measure of 
 greatness recognized in the Word of God. "Let him that would be great 
 among you be your servant," and let ns remember that our Lord measured his 
 own life by the same divine standard, for he said, "The Son of man came not 
 to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many." 
 
 I said awhile ago that on the Congo, a man ranks according to the number 
 of wives he possesses. That is the barbarian standard of greatness. We are 
 more civilized, and among ns a man often ranks according to the amount of 
 money he possesses. We have a great many millionaire barbarians. "A man's 
 life consisteth not in the abundance of things that he possesseth." The only 
 rank that counts in the kingdom of God is helpfulness to our brother — neigh- 
 borliness. It is the privilege of our life to see how much we can serve. 
 
 The third law is the law of sacrifice. I would not dare to mention this as 
 one of the supreme tests of life if it were not in the word of our Lord himself, 
 "If any man will be my disciple, let him deny himself, and take up his cross 
 daily and follow me." That is our high call to the life of sacrifice, which 
 Jesus Christ made possible for vis to live through him. It is impossible in our 
 own strength; we cannot do it ourselves. "Without me ye can do nothing;" 
 "I can do all things through Christ who strengtheneth me;" "Whosoever he 
 be of you that forsaketh not all that he hath, he cannot be my disciple;" 
 "Whosoever shall save his life shall lose it : whosoever shall lose his life for 
 
Bible Conference Addresses 
 
 my sake shall find it;" "Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, 
 it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." 
 
 I suppose this spirit was never better illustrated than in the life of Paul. 
 How did he regard this law of sacrifice ? "I am crucified with Christ : never- 
 theless I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me;" "For me to live is Christ, 
 and to die is gain;" "Because we thus judge, that if one died for all, then 
 were all dead : and that he died for all, that they which live should not hence- 
 forth live unto themselves, but unto him which died for them, and rose again." 
 Likewise in his teachings as to how those who are thus redeemed should live, 
 he leaves no room for question : "Glorify God therefore in your body and 
 spirit, which are God's;" "T beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of 
 God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, 
 which is your reasonable service." I wish we could see more plainly the 
 reasonableness of it. I wish we could get away from the formal way we do 
 things and do it as unto the Lord, knowing it is a reasonable service. When 
 we get to that i:)lace, then we are going to do all the work we can, in the very 
 best way we can, because we are conscious that it is the work that was planned 
 for each one of us to do, and we will live absolutely under the Lordship of 
 Jesus Christ, doing as he did, living a life of daily sacrifice, to the glory of 
 God, serving our fcllow-mon. 
 
 I would that we could rightly realize how much this law of sacrifice is a 
 part of that first great commandment of Christ. "God so loved the world 
 that he gave himself." "LTereby know we love, because he laid do\vn his life 
 for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren."" It cost God a 
 great deal to make salvation possible. It is going to cost us something to 
 make it applicable to the world. If we think it is not worth while, and per- 
 fectly feasible, we make a great mistake. "God so loved the world, that he 
 gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, 
 but have everlasting life." "He spared not his own Son, but delivered him 
 up freely for us all." "We ought to lay down our life for the brethren." In 
 this connection, I want to relate the story of an African girl, as told by a 
 missionary pastor of the London Missionary Society. 
 
 In the native church they do not celebrate the Christmas season with the 
 giving of gifts among themselves, but by bringing to our Lord an offering on 
 his birthday. It was at this service of free-will offering that the people passed 
 before their pastor and deposited their gifts. Among them came a young girl 
 who drew from her tattered, garment a silver coin worth about eighty-five 
 cents — a fortune to a woman of her class. The missionary was much sur- 
 prised, but, not wishing to interrupt the service, waited imtil'the close, when 
 he called her aside and asked whence she secured so nuich money. She ex- 
 plained that because she loved her Savior and desired to give him a worthy 
 gift on his birthday, she had gone to a neighboring planter and sold herself 
 to be his slave all the rest of her life, and had brought the equivalent of her 
 life of service as an offering for her King. 
 
 When we have the same spirit as this poor slave girl, when the church is 
 surcharged with the spirit of self-abandonment and fired with an ambition 
 for the accomplishment of that for which Christ came down from heaven to 
 earth and gave his life to make possible, I say to you men there is little chance 
 of it not getting done. 
 
 9 
 
Union Biblical Seminary 
 
 I want to ask you to look at William Carey; he was so embarrassed about 
 spending his salary on himself that he tried to see how much he could give to 
 God. He found he could live on one-half of what he got and he gave the rest 
 to God for the salvation of his fellow-men. "When his salary was increased to 
 $7,500 per year, he continued to live on the petty amount he had learned to 
 spend on himself, some $250 I think it was, and he gave the remainder to God, 
 and at the close of his life he had been able to turn back into the treasury of 
 God $200,000 as a result of his service in India. It was the spirit of Christ, 
 who gave himself for the salvation of the world, that enabled him to do it. 
 
 John G. Paton, whose life you have read, has had a very wonderful sale of 
 his book. About $100,000 profit has come from the sale of that book. He has 
 turned it all into the Lord's treasury and has gone back to give his remaining 
 days to the service of God among the people of the New Hebrides. Years ago 
 he abandoned himself to the will of God, for the salvation of the cannibals of 
 these islands, and God has given him to see the people clothed and in their 
 right minds. 
 
 When we were in Calcutta, we received a contrilmtion from a lady, amount- 
 ing to $25.00, and we thought she must be a very rich lady, and after a while 
 we wrote her that the work was going on, told her some experiences of our 
 work there, and suggested another contribution. At length an answer came 
 to us, written in a poor, trembling hand on an old piece of paper, saying she 
 could not send us another twenty-five dollars; it represented the savings of 
 years. "I am only a poor old woman," she said, "and I bake pies and cakes 
 and sell them to make a living. Since sending you that twenty-five dollars I 
 have only been able to save ten dollars. I gladly send you that, and I wish 
 I could have saved more. I must pray that others will supply the need." She 
 had given in one offering to God the result of years' saving. 
 
 When I returned to this country I happened to pass through the city and 
 thought I would look up the old lady. She was too weak to bake pies and 
 cakes and sell them any longer, and she had gone to an old ladies' home, for 
 she had saved nothing for herself. A hundred years from now do you think 
 she will regret the sacrifice she made for the people of India ? In the presence 
 of her Lord, when she sees the redeemed ones of India, do you imagine she will 
 regret for one minute her sacrifice here on earth ? 
 
 God wants our best. He has a fair and just claim on the first fruits of our 
 increase. In proportion as we obey that first and great commandment of our 
 Lord to love God supremely and our neighbor as ourself, we will want to give 
 God the best — we will give ourselves for the world even as he loved us and 
 gave himself for us. Oh, friends, let us remember how once our Lord poured 
 out his soul for us, and in the prime of his mysterious manhood gave his 
 precious life upon the cross, daring to give us the best that he had. 
 
 Immediately following the address by Mr. White, Dr. O. P. Gifford gave an 
 outline of the duty of tithing as based on the Scriptural law. 
 
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Bible Conference Addresses 
 
 ifritiap OPorning. 
 
 Prayer. 
 
 O God, our Father, we thanl? thee for what thou hast set before us as pos- 
 sible in thy name. We thank thee that we can do what thou dost command us 
 to do, and that we dare not do less and even profess to be loyal to thee. We 
 thank thee that thy people are free-will offerings in the day of thy power, and 
 that the day of thy power has come when they are free-will offerings in thy 
 hand. Lord, make every life here to-day by its own glad choice a free-will 
 offering to thee; and with our lives may we give our children and our posses- 
 sions and our influence and our all; change the world through us to God, We 
 thank thee that thou hast, and that thou wilt if we will let thee do it,_save us 
 from our narrow, mean, selfish purposes, when the world waits a setting free 
 that can only come as we go out with the message, which our Lord has com- 
 missioned us to carry to all the world. We thank thee that the world is re- 
 deemed so far as Christ can do it; his sacrifice is complete. Oh, help us to 
 make known this redemption, and may we live for this as the most command- 
 ing thing to live for, and wherever our residence is, and whatever our occupa- 
 tion is, may our identification Avith Christ be such that we shall live to accom- 
 plish his purpose with our whole heart. Use mightily this class of young men 
 who are going out into leadership in thy service. Save any one of them from 
 living for any personal ambition. Grant that every one of them may be will- 
 ing to go anywhere in the world for thee, and may they follow thy leadership 
 into the field which thou wilt mark out for them, and give us every one, 
 whether ministers or laymen, or women or children, give us every one the 
 spirit of obedience to our Lord and of sjTiipathy with him and of likeness to 
 him that will make it impossible for us to work without seeing how much we 
 can do to change these conditions of dire distress and inexplicable need. For- 
 give us, we pray thee, that we have done so little in view of our opportunities, 
 that we have prayed so little when prayer might have accomplished so much ; 
 that we have sacrificed so little when our Lord has sacrificed all ; and grant us 
 this day a touch of his life upon iis that will make us henceforth more com- 
 pletely like him. We ask it for his name's sake. Amen. 
 
 Opening Address by J. Campbell White. 
 
 Bible Conference, to be true to its name, is meant to partake largely of the 
 conference feature, and I think all great assemblies ought to have a good 
 
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Union Bihlical Seminary 
 
 deal of this feature in order to realize the largest profit from such meetings; 
 and our plan, beginning with this morning's session, after one address, is to 
 have time for questions or discussions from the floor. After Doctor Gifford 
 speaks to us this morning on the great divine law of Christian giving, we 
 want any of you who are here to endorse what he says briefly, if yovi feel like 
 it, or ask any one in the audience anything that will throw light on the sub- 
 ject. The permanent value of these meetings will depend very largely on 
 these conference features, and I do hope we will set aside any spirit of hesita- 
 tion that may naturally take possession of us and overcome it, so that we may 
 all help each other. Those coming out of the city have not come with the 
 attitude of knowing everything, but that we believe we know some things. 
 But there will he a much more permanent value to these meetings if we ex- 
 press the convictions we have concerning the discussions along which we are 
 led. I am sure you will listen very prayerfully to what Doctor GIfford has to 
 say about "Tithing a Christian Duty." 
 
 <*^ 
 
 Address by Doctor Gifford. 
 
 TITHING A CHEISTIAN DVTY.— Hebrews 7. 
 
 Any system is better than no system; the best system is none too good. The 
 good is evermore the enemy of the better ; the better is the worst enemy of the 
 best. The constant danger is, of arrested development. "Remember Lot's 
 wife" ; she lost what she had by not going on to get what she ought. Terah 
 and Abraham started out of Ur of the Chaldees. "And they came to Haran 
 and dwelt there. And Terah died in ITai-an." But not until he had begotten 
 sons, many of whose descendants are with us in church life to-day, men who 
 start for the God-built city, but tarry in Ilaran. When the Holy Spirit 
 brooded over chaos, division preceded evolution, water from water, life from 
 death, low forms of life at first, then higher; first monkey, then man. But 
 why, when yovi have come so far as the monkey, stop, get a cage, open a mu- 
 seum, and refuse to go farther? What was good enoxigh in the past tense of 
 the verb of life is not good enough in the present tense. 
 
 We believe in foreordination, but what is the use of being foreordained if 
 we do not foreordain in turn? Man is not the end of God's plan; he. seeks to 
 work through tis, as well as up to its. 
 
 SYSTEM, NOT SPASM, IS OOD's METHOD. 
 
 New Hampshire has developed two sorts of Baptists, Calvinistic and Free 
 Will. Dr. A. J. Gordon's father used to say he could tell one from the other 
 by seeing their wood-piles. "Work out your own salvation with fear and 
 trembling, for it is God who worketh in you to will and to do of his good 
 pleasure," and his good pleasure is systematic in you as well as outside you. 
 The Bible is our law of life until he repeals it and inspires another, and the 
 Bible teaches the best system of giving to him. 
 
 When the tide is at flood the sea seeks and fills all open bays, harbors, inlets, 
 and forces the water back up the channels of the rivers. When a great truth 
 floods the mind it fills all the forms of expression and molds of thought. The 
 
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DR. O. P. GIFFORD 
 
Bible Conference Addresses 
 
 mind of Christ was an open seaboard to the tital movement of one great 
 truth; the kingdom of God. He saw what was in his mind; when he saw a 
 woman setting a patch on a garment, mixing leaven with meal, pouring new 
 wine into old wine-skins, he saw the kingdom of God. When he saw a man 
 lifting a net filled with fish, sowing seed by the wayside, giving a feast, he saw 
 the kingdom of God. As the sunlight glorifies the windows in the church, so 
 the great truth of the kingdom glorified the common things of life. 
 
 After the ascension, and the gift of the Holy Spirit, the Apostles began to 
 preach, but they preached the King. In Jerusalem, on the Day of Pentecost, 
 in Antioch, on Mars' Hill, in synagogue or public square, they preached the 
 King. When a conquered province swears allegiance to the king, it accepts 
 the law, institutions, and will that make the kingdom. When the world swears 
 allegiance to Christ as King, the kingdom has come. When the King con- 
 quered Greece, Pan died. Wlien the king entered the Roman Pantheon other 
 gods fled. When Christ was accepted by the Jews as Messiah, their great men 
 faded from sight as the stars fade when the svm rises. 
 
 Moses was the great man in Hebrew thought. As Pharaoh's daughter lifted 
 the babe from the Nile and gave him to Egyptian culture, so Moses lifted 
 Israel from slavery, and gave them to liberty. Moses gave the law, religion, 
 literature to Israel. But Moses was only a servant, Christ was the son: "the 
 servant abideth not forever, the son abideth ever." Side by side with Moses 
 stood Aaron the high priest, but Christ was High Priest forever after the 
 power of an endless life, of the tribe of Judah. Back of Moses and Aaron 
 stood Abraham. Back of the Niagara River is Lake Erie, but back of Erie the 
 lake system and the draining of the great Northwest. Back of Moses and 
 Aaron was Abraham, the friend of God, the father of the children of Israel. 
 "The law came by Moses," but life came from Abraham. The Hebrew's high- 
 est boast was, "Abraham is my father," his fondest hope to rest in Abraham's 
 bosom. 
 
 ABRAHAM LIVED BY FAITH. 
 
 The law bracketed the national life for a time, but true life is by faith. 
 
 Abraham and Lot got along nicely together so long as they were poor. 
 Riches divide. Two poor men can live in one room. Each rich man wants ^ 
 suite of rooms, and if he is very rich, a whole house to himself. Wealth is 
 centrifugal, poverty centripetal. Money pushes men apart, poverty binds men 
 together. Abraham gave Lot the first choice. Once at least in the light of 
 history, the senior partner gave the junior partner the first choice. Lot chose 
 foolishly, thinking only of a pasturage for his flocks, and a market for his 
 fleece and mutton. He was attacked, carried away into captivity, bankrupted. 
 Abraham came to his rescue, saved Lot, and spoiled the kings. On his way 
 back to Hebron he passed Jerusalem; there he met his master, Melchizedek, 
 "Priest of the Most High God." The Jews emphasize ancestry, think much of 
 heredity. Our family trees compared with theirs are bushes to banyan trees, 
 gourds to century oaks. Our Daughters of the Revolution, or Descendants 
 of the Pilgrims, are children compared to centenarians. We drink filtered 
 water, the Jews boast of filtered blood, rich and clear through the centuries. 
 But Melchizedek had no coat of arms, no ancestry, no heredity. "Without be- 
 ginning of years or ending of days, a priest forever." Yet Abraham paid, 
 
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Union Biblical Seminary 
 
 tithes to him. "Christ is a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek." 
 He is not in the line of Aaron, of the tribe of Levi, but of the tribe of Judah, 
 after the order of Melchizedek. "Here men that die receive tithes, but there 
 he receiveth them, of whom it is witnessed that he liveth." 
 
 We believe that the Epistle to the Hebrews was ivritten by inspiration, and 
 the Holy Spirit puts the tithe on the ground that Christ is our High Priest, 
 not after the order of Aaron, but of Melchizedek, grounding it not in the law, 
 but in the life of faith. 
 
 Ever and again I meet a man who rebels against the tithe because it was 
 part of a legal system; who says, "I am not imder law." That is just the 
 trouble with a large criminal class in the United States today, some poor, some 
 rich, they are not under law. Do not, I pray you, class yourselves with such, 
 lest a policeman put you where you can break the law in thought, but not in 
 act! When the Eoman soldier found that Paul was a Roman he said, "At 
 great price got I this liberty." Liberty to do what? Obey law. And Paul 
 said, "I was freeborn." Free to do what? 
 
 FREEDOM IS THE FRUIT OP LAW, 
 
 and carries in its heart a seed that builds a new body in conformity with law. 
 The trouble is, that there are altogether too many members of oar churches 
 who are not under law, who mistake liberty for license, who feel no sense of 
 obligation to perform duty. There is not a tree of the forest, a bird of the 
 air, a fish in the sea, not under law. The Christian is under the law of life in 
 Christ Jesus, and Christ is our High Priest, and we owe him a tithe of our 
 possessions. Do not mistake. 
 
 Law does not create duties, laiv recognizes duties, regulates duties, enforces 
 duties. 
 
 Duties grow out of the nature of things. To be is to be in relation; to be 
 in relation is to have duties ; and law recognizes duties and seeks to regulate 
 relations. When Robinson Crusoe was alone on the island he had no duties 
 to his fellows, except to keep himself so that when fellows might come he could 
 bless and not curse. When he found Friday, relations commenced, duties be- 
 gan. He was under law to recognize relations, and do duties. Laws passed at 
 Washington that are not based on the nature of things sink into innocuous 
 desuetude, are neglected, or replaced. The law, given by Moses, endures be- 
 cause it deals with relations that are real, and enforces duties that are natural. 
 
 The law of Moses did hot create relations, nor duties. "Thou shalt not 
 commit adultery." Was it right to commit adultery before Moses gave the 
 law ? Is it right for those who never heard the law ? Are you under the law ? 
 Vegetable and animal life depend upon water. Water is formed of two gases, 
 hydrogen and oxygen. To divorce these is to destroy life. The state depends 
 for its stability upon the family. The destruction of the family is the disin- 
 tegration of the state. Adultery destroys the family and the state, poisons 
 the stream of national life at its source, reverses the miracle of Elisha with 
 the fount of Jericho, and kills. An adulterous family is a doomed state. The 
 law simply states a principle, enforces a duty, creates neither. 
 
 "Thou shalt not kill." Murder was not made a crime by stating a law. Cain 
 was a criminal long before Moses was born. You cannot cut the threads and 
 
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Bible Conference Addresses 
 
 preserve the web. You cannot keep the state and murder the citizens. Family 
 life must be pure, and individual life sacred. "Thou shalt not steal." Prop- 
 erty rights must he respected, or there can be no trade, and Mathout trade 
 there can be no civilization. Men will not produce unless they can preserve. 
 Peril to property breeds improvidence. Theft does not become a crime when 
 law forbids it; it is recognized as a crime by law. 
 
 "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor." "A good name is 
 rather to be chosen than great riches," but you must not choose your neigh- 
 bor's good name. 
 
 "Good name, in man or woman, dear my lord. 
 Is the immediate jewel of their souls : 
 
 Who steals my purse steals trash; 't is something, nothing; 
 'T was mine, 't is his, and has been slave to thousands ; 
 But he that filches from me my good name 
 Robs me of that which not enriches him 
 And makes me poor indeed." 
 
 The stealer of money can be caught and restitution made, but who shall 
 catch and secure restitution of a good name filched ? Money I can earn again, 
 but where a good name? But slander was not made a crime by the law. 
 
 "Thou shalt not covet." That spirit wrongs the man who sins more than to 
 steal. I am no poorer because you covet my estate, and you are no richer, but 
 covetousness hath eaten out of your soul like moth in a garment, and the 
 treasure you have is lost. You cannot enjoy what you have while you covet 
 what I have. Covetousness is soul suicide. It was just as silly and wrong 
 before Moses spoke as after. So of all the law. 
 
 The law does not make the road, any more than the guide-hoard does, hut it 
 does tell where to go, and where not. 
 
 _ The law accepted the tithe, did not create it, wove it into the web of national 
 life. If you refuse to tithe because Moses commanded Israel to tithe, then be 
 logical and see how long the modern state will respect your position. The fact 
 that so wise a man as Moses embodied the tithe in his system commends it to 
 me. He was not of the kind that can see no good except he has created it, and 
 .cares more for freedom than for success. 
 The prophet enforces the tithe. 
 
 Malachi insists that men who do not pay tithes do steal, that men who are 
 ahove ohedience to law are heloiv the level of honest men. 
 
 Christ commends the tithe. Abraham gave tithes; Moses commanded tith- 
 ing; Christ commended tithing. What Christ commends is my command. He 
 looked into the faces of the scribes and Pharisees and said, "Ye pay tithes of 
 mint, and anise, and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the 
 law, judgment, mercy, and faith ; these ought ye to have done, and not to leave 
 the other undone." The Pharisees had no right to compromise with duties, to 
 do one set and leave the other set undone. We are in danger of m.oral bank- 
 ruptcy, of seeking to compromise with God for fifty per cent. We should not 
 commend the man who tithes and omits the weightier matters, nor the man 
 who attends_ to the weightier matters and omits the tithe. Both are commanded. 
 The earth yields crops of two sorts, root and top crops. We eat the roots and 
 
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Union Biblical Se'minary 
 
 reject the tops, or eat the tops and reject the roots. No one cares for the top 
 of a turnip, nor the roots of a cabbage. But in dealing with the duties that 
 grow in the garden of the Lord there is no such' division. He who breaks the 
 least commandment is guilty of the whole. You must lock doors and bar win- 
 dows if you would sleep safely. You must tithe and obey the weightier matters 
 of the law if you would please the Lawgiver. You do not win the right to 
 steal by keeping the Sabbath, nor the right to break the Sabbath by paying 
 your debts. 
 
 Obedience to the tithe is as much a part of religion as judgment, mercy, and 
 faith. 
 
 The divorce court threatens the stability of the state. Divorced duties 
 threaten the church. "What God hath joined together let no mail put asun- 
 der," in marriage or morals. Immortality lies not so much in the thing done, 
 as in the motives for doing it. To dodge any duty is to reveal a wrong spirit, 
 and no man knows what will follow when the spirit is wrong. Ye ought to 
 worship God, ye ought to pay your debts, and the tithe is your debt to God. Ye 
 ought to observe the ritual of religion, ye ought to be honest and righteous. 
 Do not make your conscience a South Dakota where duties are divorced. 
 
 But some one says, "Christ was talking to Pharisees, his words have no 
 bearing on my case." If these words of Christ have no bearing on you, then 
 no words of Christ are anything to you. All his teachings were to the Jews, 
 all his promises were to men we never saw. 
 
 If you are going to limit the application of his ivords to the m-yn he spoJce 
 to, you have evaporated the Christian religion. 
 
 The Sermon on the Mount, the Lord's Prayer, the promises of eternal life, 
 the pledge of the resurrection, fall like snowflakes on a rapid river and disap- 
 pear, like rain on a desert, and are absorbed. 
 
 CHRIST TAUGHT PRINCIPLES TO AND THROUGH MEX 
 
 as the sun shines through these memorial windows and lifts the room out of 
 darkness. Your attitude is the most dangerous and meanest form of higher 
 criticism. We can handle unbelievers' higher criticism, but the practical 
 atheism of professed Christians is the Judas kiss by Gethsemane. We flee 
 from it and leave the Master in the hands of enemies, with the cross in sight. 
 If Christians obey what Christ commands, the church can defy the attacks of 
 enemies. Achan in the army was mightier than the men of Ai when Joshua 
 tried to force the pass. 
 
 TITHING IS SCIENTIFIC, IT PAYS WHEN TRIED IN THE BUSINESS IJFE. 
 
 Doctor Chadwick, of Leeds, England, tells us his experience in dealing with 
 men. There were two members of his church v/ho were poor; they formed a 
 company to do business together; both were Christians. John said to Thomas 
 and Thomas said to John: "Now, we will give a certain per cent, of our 
 profits to the Lord." The first year the per cent, was small because the profits 
 were small; it needed no great effort to give one cent out of ten cents, or ten 
 cents out of a dollar, or one hundred out of a thousand ; but when it came to 
 ten thousand dollars out of a hundred thousand, they felt the pinch. The tide 
 of prosperity rolled in ; the second, third, and fourth years they kept their vow 
 
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Bible Conference Addi'esses 
 
 to God; the fifth they said they were giving too mvich; they would give half 
 as much hereafter; they divided their tenth into half, gave one-half, and kept 
 the other half themselves. That year they did not make a payment; in the 
 second six months they M'ere bankrupt. They went to the prayer room, and 
 side by side they knelt and vowed to redeem their vow to the living God. They 
 found that the tide turned to prosperity again. 
 But you say, "That is bribing God." Is it? 
 
 CAN YOU BRIBE GOD? 
 
 A bribe means a man to buy and a man to be bought. Can the God you 
 worship be bribed? Then you had better change gods. Tithing is one condi- 
 tion of material prosperity. Nine-tenths with God, will go farther and do more 
 than ten-tenths without him. If it is wrong to succeed, why try? If it is 
 right, why not try all ways? Is it bribing God to be industrious, economical, 
 honest ? Is it bribing God to pray for success ? Then why is it bribing God 
 to tithe when he has commanded that as truly as economy, honesty, prayer? 
 The underlying fallacy of our daily life is that certain hours belong to God, 
 and the rest to us; certain duties belong to God and the rest to us. "Seek ye 
 first the kingdom of God and his righteousness," always first in time and in 
 interest. 
 
 7^ is not bribing the government to pay your taxes. It is not bribing God 
 to pay your tithe. 
 
 You do not give a tithe, you pay a tithe. You do not give until you have 
 paid the tithe. Free-will offerings come later, through the open door of the 
 tithe. You do not give God the Sabbath. He claims it. If you wish to give 
 him time out of the other six days, that is a gift. So of the tithe ; it is God's 
 part of your prosperity. "As the Lord prospers." But this was written to men 
 who had been bred to tithing in Judaism and heathenism. The proportion had 
 been set as a mold, the time to pour in the money was declared to be the first 
 day of the week for Christians. The doing of this duty, as of all moral duties, 
 has closest bearing on moral character, and so on prosperity. 
 
 Paying the tithe to God makes him a silent partner in your business, and 
 thus sanctifies your whole business life. ■ This tithe that is due is not the 
 maximum, but the minimum; the center of the circle, not the circumference; 
 but the man v>Jto has a center is pretty apt to have a circum,ference. 
 
 Marshall Field paid his taxes like an honest man ; he gave largely after- 
 ward. Tax dodgers are not large givers. 
 
 Because you keep the Sabbath, you are not at liberty to serve the devil the 
 other six days. They are given to you for the doing of your own work, not the 
 devil's work. Through the open window of the Sabbath the light of the up- 
 lifted covmtenance floods the other six days. Through the tithe God smiles 
 upon the nine-tenths. You know it pays to keep the Sabbath holy. You do 
 not bribe God by obedience. It is not bribing God to pay the tithe, yet he 
 blesses the nine-tenths because you pay your debt. 
 
 You despise a man who is dishonest with his fellotvs. Why honor the man 
 who is dishonest with God'? 
 
 The blessing of God rests upon certain old-fashioned virtues. The man who 
 practices them is not attempting to bribe God. Honesty with God is quite as 
 
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Union Biblical Seminary 
 
 commendable as honesty with men. Do not pat yourself on the back when you 
 pay your tax to the State, nor boast when you pay your tithe to God. "This 
 ought ye to have done." And God blesses the man who does what he ought, 
 but the blessing comes not from a bribed God. 
 
 Doctor Chadwick told of a poor woman who had a small income; she owned 
 a little house; for it she received ten shillings a week. Every Saturday night 
 she placed the ten shillings side by side on the table. You know an English 
 shilling is worth twenty- five cents. She took out the shiniest one of the lot; 
 she lived on the nine. Her pastor said, "Yoti are giving too much." She re- 
 plied, "The dear Lord can make a penny do for two when I pay what I owe 
 him." I would rather live on nine shillings with God than on one hundred 
 dollars without him. 
 
 He had another member of his church, a most devout, pious member, a 
 washerwoman; she said to her pastor: "I am giving all I can; I wash four 
 days in the week ; I earn two dollars ; I cannot spare any more." A little later 
 she came with radiant face and said : "A woman has engaged me to wash 
 Fridays; what I earn in my Friday wash, I give to God. That is the hap- 
 piest day in the week." She was working five days; one day she gave her work 
 to God. 
 
 Money is of no value except as it can meet needs. The hest use brings most 
 happiness. 
 
 A happy man can do more and better work. It pays to tithe in terms of 
 money and happiness. 
 
 II. It pays in spiritual power. Malachi promises (3:10) that Jehovah will 
 open the windows of heaven and pour out an unmeasured blessing, when the 
 tithe is brought in. The spring to the window of heaven is in the pocket of 
 the worshiper. We grope for the spring with hands of prayer. Reach down, 
 not up. Listen to a parable. I have a little box in the safety deposit vault, 
 in the box a few savings, in my pocket the key. One day I went down to the 
 vault, the keeper opened the door to me, walked to the box with me. I fell on 
 my knees and began to plead with the keeper to open the box. He said, "Isn't 
 the key in your pocket ?" I sprang to my feet, handed him the key ; he opened 
 the box. The church is on its knees before God, begging him to open the win- 
 dows of heaven, to pour out a blessing; she pleads, she agonizes, she begs, and 
 the voice of God asks, "Isn't the key in your pocket ?" "Bring ye the whole 
 tithe into the storehouse, . . . and prove me now herewith, saith the Lord of 
 hosts, if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a bless- 
 ing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it." Ours is a scientific 
 age. "Prove me now herewith, saith the Lord of hosts." 
 
 Nitrogen, they tell us, is a substance that bviilds \ip the human body. We 
 find it in air. It enters the human body along the line of animal and vegetable 
 life. Man finds that vegetable life exhausts the soil. Prophets tell us that 
 when the earth becomes bankrupt humanity will stai've. Farmers tell us that 
 rotation of crops reimburses the soil: certain kinds of plants overdraw the 
 bank account of nitrogen in the soil ; other kinds deposit more than they take 
 out. Peas, beans, clover, and alfalfa draw nitrogen from the air and leave in 
 the soil more than they use. Wheat, oats, barley, and rye draw out more nitro- 
 gen for their own use than they deposit in the soil. So the fanner sows seeds 
 
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Bible Conference Addresses 
 
 that deposit a new bank account; they draw down nitrogen into the soil and 
 he keeps on in business. 
 
 How can we get more nitrogen into the soil? Seven-tenths of the air is 
 nitrogen. The earth lies on the threshold of the air, like Lazarus on the 
 threshold of Dives' palace: he cries for nitrogen while Dives is overloaded. 
 The earth begs for nitrogen. How can we get the nitrogen from the air, then 
 put it down into the earth to build crops? This is the great problem of agri- 
 culture. 
 
 Many years ago a German experimented and learned some things: he ana- 
 lyzed the soil and found under the microscope that certain plants contain 
 microscopical bacteria tull of nitrogen; the little fellows pick the pocket of 
 the air, and deposit the nitrogen in the earth. Nitrogen is piled up around the 
 roots of certain forms of plant life that it loves. On the roots of peas, beans, 
 alfalfa, and clover are little globules that reach up and bring the nitrogen 
 down. Then with clover, peas, beans, and alfalfa we enrich the soil, because 
 nitrogen loves the roots of this kind of plant. These Germans studied the 
 little bunches, cut them open, and analyzed them. They found them full of 
 little bacteria. They had secured a key to free nitrogen; their check was en- 
 dorsed on the back by the air, they had an endless bank account, with the air 
 above to enrich the poverty below. But they broke down ; they could not make 
 nitrogen commercially valuable. 
 
 Professor Moore, of Washington, took up the discovery where the Germans 
 broke down; he carried on the experiment until today the United States Agri- 
 cultural Department prepares nitrogen in the form of a yeast cake ; it is dis- 
 solved in water, seeds are soaked in it ; a solvation plowed into the soil increases 
 the crop forty to fovir hundred per cent. You tell me that when a farmer dis- 
 solves nitrogen bacteria in water, soaks his seed in it, plants his seed to in- 
 crease his crop four hundred per cent., that he has bribed the air? He has 
 simply mastered the secret of how to enrich the soil. 
 
 In God ive live, and move, and have our being; the building stuff that mahes 
 eternal life is large in God; the building stuff that makes eternal life is small 
 in man. How can we reach up and get eternal life and bring it down to meet 
 our needf 
 
 Pray? Yes. Search the Scriptures? Yes. Is that bribing God? Tithe? 
 Yes. Bring home the tithes in the storehouse and prove the Lord if he will 
 not open the windows of heaven and pour out a blessing that there shall not be 
 room to contain it. 
 
 Is it bribing to live according to known law? 
 
 Is it bribing favor to obey discovered law? Then never pray again; never 
 read the Scriptures again ; never try to do a righteous act again. The channels 
 through which the power of spiritual life flows out are the channels of prayer 
 and the channels of the tithe. 
 
 Is it a bribe to open the channels of spiritual life by prayer ? It is no bribe. 
 Paying the tithe is no bribe : it is paying a debt. You may pray, and read, and 
 sing, and agonize, and toil, but unless you meet all the requirements you can- 
 not get the free nitrogen of the eternal God to build perfect character. 
 
 If it is wrong to prosper in business, do not try to; if it is right, try every 
 right means. If it is wrong to prosper in spiritual life, quit praying and strug- 
 
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Union Biblical Seminary 
 
 gling, and trying to develop Christian character; if it is right, try every right 
 means. In your business, when you started you used common sense. Use com- 
 mon sense in the spiritual life, try every experiment, test every law, bend every 
 energy. Be as scientific as in any form of life God has given man, 
 
 Christ is the High Priest of our confession. We come trooping up from the 
 valley, after the struggle, with our spoils. Let us lay the tithe of our posses- 
 sions at the feet of the High Priest of our confession, and he will hless us in 
 our business and in our spiri*iJfd life. 
 
 Appendix. 
 
 RECKONING THE TITHE. 
 
 We assume that you have reached the point where you believe the tithe or 
 tenth of your income belongs to God, that the tithe is not a gift, but answering 
 a claim. One-seventh of the time, one-tenth of the property. The Sabbath 
 is not to be used for personal gain, the tithe is not to be spent by you on your- 
 self. Day and money, time and tithe, belong to God. 
 
 When Abraham paid tithes to Melchizedek, he gave one-tenth of all the 
 spoils; he did not reckon the cost of equipping his army, the cost of the cam- 
 paign, did not deduct any amount from the whole treasure. 
 
 When Jacob made his vow to Jehovah on Bethel, he said, "Of all that thou 
 shalt give me, I will surely give the tenth unto thee." There is no hint of 
 counting out the cost of getting. If you cut a loaf into ten parts and give 
 one part, you do not count the cost of flour, yeast, labor, heat, before cutting 
 the tithe slice. If a man furnishes capital, on condition that he receive a tithe 
 of all that comes to you, he must have one-tenth as much as you do of all that 
 comes in. 
 
 In the matter of salary the division is easy, one dollar in ten, taken out of 
 the entire sum, before personal expenses are reckoned. 
 
 With the farmer, one-tenth of the grain when reaped, of the cattle when 
 sold, of the fruit when gathered,, and one-tenth of the money received in the 
 market; for the farmer has had his shelter and board and warmth off the 
 farm while working it. He is a fixed charge, and has taken cost of production 
 out as he goes along, the cost of horses and oxen, and care of help has come 
 out of the farm as he works men and animals. 
 
 If in business, the net that remains after rent, interest on money, salaries 
 of help, but not personal expenses. If a partner shares in the gross receipts, 
 he must also share in the expenses. If you tithe the gross, then take out the 
 tithe of expenses. Or the tithe might be reckoned one of the fixed charges, as 
 taxes are, to come out of the gross amount, reckoned with insurance. "Let every 
 man be fully persuaded in his own mind." "If any of you lack wisdom, let him 
 ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not." — If a man 
 seek first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness, all other things shall be 
 added, and among the additions will be additions of wisdom to settle detail. 
 
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Bible Conference Addresses 
 
 Remarks by J. Campbell White. 
 
 Unless the presentation of this morning's speech is absolutely wrong in its 
 whole spirit and outlook, we are facing the solution of one of the greatest 
 problems before us; and certainly before entering into any conference on the 
 subject it is most appropriate that we stop and ask God wherein we are failing 
 so largely to fulfill these conditions, and ask him to give us the spirit of re- 
 sponsiveness and teachableness and obedience that will enable us to fulfill 
 conditions that are not being fulfilled by us; that God will give us faith to 
 see clearly and to act rightly. 
 
 If into any denomination there can come the prevailing spirit of giving the 
 proportion he has always insisted upon, that denomination will set a pace 
 for Christendom in the world. Is it not proper that we should pray and then 
 confer further with each other in the presence of God about what he would 
 have us do ? 
 
 Conference Discussion. 
 
 Question: What are you going to tithe — gross or net? 
 
 Doctor Gifford answered : When Jacob had spent the night in the open and 
 the window of night was opened above him, then he made a vow: "If God 
 will be with me, and will keep me in this Way that I go, and will give me 
 bread to eat, and raiment to put on, so that I come again to my father's house 
 in peace, .... and of all that thou shalt give me I will surely give the tenth 
 unto thee." And when Abrahatu paid' tithes to Melchizedek, he gave him one- 
 tenth of all the spoils. That was gross. I suppose when a man is in business, 
 the rent of the building, the ins\irance, the interest on the loan, and all that 
 comes oiit before he has anything, that the net after the expenses of the busi- 
 ness, before he takes out his personal debts, one-tenth of the net belongs to God. 
 Jt is not his until he has paid the interest, and taxes, and insurance, and wages. 
 He can not pay a tithe and then cheat his employees. 
 
 A man on a salary, which he gets, say, at the end of the month, as I am, 
 the tenth comes out before I set down a slice for the rest, for the family ex- 
 penses such as the education of the children, or the grocery bill. 
 
 I presvmie the Jew tithed as the Mohammedan or Mormon tithes. When he 
 gets ten quarts of milk he gives one-tenth to the church; he gives one-tenth 
 of the soil or animal life to the church and lives on the nine-tenths. History 
 says early Christians used to do this. 
 
 I remember some years ago, when father's health failed him, I used to send 
 him, as I was delighted to, a check to care for him, and a friend of mine said, 
 "You ought to take that out of the tithe." Yes; support your father out of 
 the tithe. Is not God your Father? 
 
 I think a man should tithe as fast as the money comes in ; not spasmodi- 
 cally, but methodically. God does nothing by spasms except to cast out devils. 
 The Protestant form of service is spasmodic, like a child teething that has 
 spasms. There are spasms of evangelistic service, spasms of special service, 
 spasms of special appeal. When they had a spasm of fire on the California 
 
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Union Biblical Seminary 
 
 coast, they called in the regulars, and system sat down on the spasm and cured 
 it. One great advantage of this system is compulsory system. We are not 
 failing so much in the lack of faith and truth as in the lack of system. 
 
 Question: Suppose I am a newly converted man, and during the earlier 
 years of my life I come into possession of an estate. From that estate I have 
 quite a little income. Now, where should my tithing begin ? 
 
 Answer : The day of your l)irth. Take one-tenth of the income, no matter 
 what the source. 
 
 Question : Is it meant that no man not spiritually born should tithe ? 
 
 Answer: First duty is to get spiritually born. 
 
 Question: How introduce this idea in a church? 
 
 Answer: I would issue literature, and get the scheme advertised through 
 literature; get pamphlets that are issued on the subject and begin personal 
 work. I would begin on the field that is most mellow. Get hold of two or 
 three who are nearest to that point, and when they believe in it, get them 
 to stand squarely for it. If you get a convert, you have a firebrand. The 
 man who just believes it, believes it tremendously. The tithe is a minimum, 
 not a maximum. When you have a center you can describe a circle. 
 
 Canvass the church. Say there are two classes of people in this church, 
 those who can give and those who have to be given to. We will start a fund 
 and loan you ten cents or a quarter a week; but you must have nn envelope. 
 If you have no income or no means of income, we will support you in this 
 way; but all the blood in this ecclesiastical body must circulate. Do not have 
 any false pride about it. If you can not march, we will carry you; but you 
 must carrj^ a broomstick. Every one should give something. Some people 
 are too poor to give by any rule of worldly wisdom, and yet, down in the poorest 
 section of the city of Boston, where three or four people live in one or two 
 rooms, if a child dies they put a can out on the threshold and all the residents 
 drop a penny or nickel or dime in it, and they get money to bury the dead. 
 It is amazing what people can do when touched by the Spirit of God. 
 
 Question : I have a member in my church receiving ten dollars per week. He 
 is paying $12.50 rent per month. He has three small children. The oldest 
 one is six. He is giving twenty-five cents per week in the church. Do you 
 think he is giving enough? 
 
 Answer : I would be tempted to try the ex-periment of trying to make myself 
 worth more than ten dollars per week. 
 
 Second answer: There are a great many workingmen receiving only ten 
 and twelve dollars per week, and the rents in this city are high — from ten to 
 twelve dollars — and they are paying more than one-tenth of their income to 
 the Lord. I know it; and they are saving money while they are doing it. A 
 large proportion of tithing in Dayton started through a boy who was making 
 five dollars a week and helping to support his mother. He always had some- 
 thing to give M'hen a good cause came, and a group of young men asked him 
 how it happened that every week he had fifty cents. The influence of that boy 
 in this city twenty years ago and more is going out to-day among hundreds of 
 men that I know of who have been led to follow his example. Some have 
 grown wealthy as a result of the systematic life which giving has encouraged. 
 
 Question: How about making the church a storehoiise? Here is a church 
 
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Bible Conference Addresses 
 
 of three hundred members. Among them ten or a dozen or fifteen tithe. The 
 finances of this board are controlled by an official board. One of this board, 
 possibly, tithes ; the rest are opposed to it. The question that has bothered me 
 is, the justice of the money of the tithers being adjusted by those who do not 
 tithe. 
 
 Answer: The tithers of every church ought to have their own committee. 
 
 Question : Are the tithers to have their own committee, and are they to 
 advise the official board what to do ? 
 
 Answer: No. With us we have a form of pledge. I tvirn the tithe in to a 
 tithing secretary. He gives fifty per cent, of it to church expenses. That 
 goes over to the treasurer of that fund. A certain other per cent, to foreign 
 missions to that secretary, etc., the rest for a reserve fund, to be drawn from 
 when the special need comes up. The money of the tithers is kept separate. 
 
 Question: Does this cause friction between those who tithe and those who 
 do not tithe? 
 
 Answer: No. All have their own way, which is the height of ambition in 
 the Baptist Church. 
 
 There was a young man in a neighboring city who was like a frog in a 
 well, with one foot out of the well, taking one step out and going back two 
 feet. He finally went into banlcruptcy in his business and borrowed money. 
 Then the thought of the tithe began to sing itself into his soul, but he said, 
 ''Don't you see I cannot tithe, because I owe interest on borrowed money?" 
 How much did he owe God ? He is the preferred creditor. On that basis he 
 began to tithe. His spiritual life quickened. His change of mind made a 
 great many changes in his physical habits. As the months went by he found 
 himself winning the confidence of men. Men were kindly disposed toward 
 him. There was a change in himself and a change in others toward him. 
 His business increased, and now he is a very successful man. 
 
 Christ emphasizes the giving of the one-tenth when he says to the Pharisee, 
 "This ought ye to have done." History teaches us that the Greeks paid tithes, 
 the Romans and the Jews also. We have a system among the laboring men 
 there, so that if any one should get sick, he comes to us with a paper to help 
 him. Now, am T to take out of my tithe or go back to my income? 
 
 Answer : You should take it oiit of j^our income. 
 
 23 
 
Union Bihlical Seminary 
 
 JFtidap )aftetnoon. 
 
 Opening Remarks by J. Campbell White. 
 
 Let ns siig'gest the things that ought to be on our minds for special occasions 
 for prayer during this Conference. I think this would be helpful and tend 
 toward the greater reality; suggest the things .for which we need to thank God. 
 Sometimes I think we rush into the presence of God before we are sure of 
 what we want. 
 
 SUGGESTIONS AS TO WHAT THEY SHOULD PRAY FOR. 
 
 1. Removal of the saloons from Dayton. 
 
 2. Enlargement in Christian work. 
 
 3. Enlarged vision; enlarged coiirage and faith that we may consecrate 
 ourselves to this great work. 
 
 4. That the individual members of the churches may each feel personally 
 responsible for the advancement of the kingdom of Christ in the earth. 
 
 5. For a better equipment to carry forward the great work that the Lord 
 has committed to us. 
 
 6. More implicit faith in the truthfulness of God's word. 
 
 7. For the victories of the cross in our own day. Very helpful to have an 
 overmastering conviction of the authority of God's word. 
 
 8. Better consecration of those who are called by God to lead our people. 
 
 9. A passion for souls. 
 
 Those attending conventions are impressed by the multitude of subjects, 
 and a feeling of congestion comes to them and the possibility of not carry- 
 ing much away. Trying to think through two or three big things, going away 
 with two or three strong impressions that will remain as long as you live, is 
 better than getting a dozen half impressions. 
 
 After we hear another address from Doctor Gifford, and then express 
 the best of our own experience in trying to obey these commands, I think we 
 will have one very strong impression, and that is, God is giving Ihc privilege 
 of holding our possessions at his disposal and direction. This morning the 
 qiiestions dealt a good deal with little points of how to determine what the 
 tithe should be, rather than the great general principle. This afternoon I hope 
 the Conference will talk about their actual experiences; about what God has 
 revealed to their spiritual life; that students will tell of the struggles of get- 
 ting to the point of doing what God wanted them to do. Now, if we can get a 
 volume of testimony, I do not see why we should not be able to bring every- 
 body in this great audience to a imity of conviction and purpose with reference 
 to this. 
 
 24 
 
Bible Conference Addresses 
 
 Address by Doctor Gifford. 
 
 Experience interprets life. Truth is not matured by thought, but by life. 
 Truth in the brain is a very pleasant companion, but truth in the life becomes 
 a very useful servant. The Master said, "I came that ye might have life, and 
 life more abundant." The great trouble with preachers is, they think when 
 they have thought things through it is time for the benediction. No, brethren, 
 the process is only begun when thoiight through clearly. It must be lived 
 through consistently. If a man has thought it through, but does not live it, 
 you need not expect that any one will take the thought from him. I remember 
 years ago, when I was a clerk in a New York store, I had set my mind on a 
 merchant's career. I attended a church in Brooklyn. A Bible teacher became 
 interested in my personal welfare. For weeks I struggled for the light. At 
 one meeting I rose for prayer eight times. I expected to be massaged into the 
 kingdom. I thought if I could get others to pray for me I would somehow get 
 into the kingdom. At a certain meeting a student preached on Faith, and 
 said: "When I close my eyes I blot oat this congregation. When I open my 
 eyes I see this congregation. Opening my eyes has created nothing. Faith 
 creates nothing. Doubt destroys nothing. Faith relates you personally to 
 what is." During the rest of the morning I opened and shut my eyes and 
 looked around, and I said, "It works." 
 
 As far as I am concerned, this congregation disappears when I shut my eyes. 
 I bowed my head and said I would open my eyes and walk in the light. Now, 
 we are face to face with a great truth. Doiibt does not destroy it. Faith does 
 not create it. Doubt bars you from it, and faith relates you to it, and when 
 you have lifted the lids of your soul and seen it, then you are under obligations 
 to live it. You may not know just ■vvhere it will carry you. I was rather inter- 
 ested, as I sat here this afternoon, in listening to the crying of a little child 
 behind me. The father of the child was trying to keep him silent, but the 
 child cried and cried until the father adjourned with his crying baby. Now, 
 you may not know where this tithe child will take you, if you adopt it. If it 
 is right, do it. If it is wrong, quit it. Do not fool around. If you settle in 
 your soul that it is wrong to tithe, stop it. If you have reached the conviction 
 that it is right, do it, even if the church does not believe in it. Your personal 
 obligation begins when you have reached the conviction of duty for your own 
 soul. That is all. What are your marching orders? WHiy, go into all the 
 world and preach the gospel. Well, obey orders. That is all. That comprised 
 the power under Alexander. When you see a duty, brother soldier, go and do 
 it. Do not speculate. Your brains are congested with truth. Now, manifest 
 it through active sei'vice. 
 
 What is the basis of all this ? What lies back of it ? Life, like a Japanese 
 picture, with no perspective, is poor art, tremendously poor. Back of the power 
 of the Niagara Falls lies the power of the Great Lake system. Daniel Web- 
 ster was a great man. Lie had no "superiors ; no equals at the bench. A friend 
 asked him, "What is the most important thoiight that has entered your mind?" 
 He dropped his head and gravely said, "The thought of my personal account- 
 ability to Almighty God." There is perspective for you. 
 
 George Washington was a great man. His like the Republic has not seen 
 since he fell asleep in Virginia. In his little library is one book, by Judge 
 
 25 
 
Union Biblical Seminary 
 
 Matthew Hale, on morals, which opens , naturally to one page, worn thin by 
 touch of finger and thumb. That page teaches this accountability to God for 
 what is done in the body. This is what was back of that marvelous life of per- 
 sonal integrity. 
 
 Emanuel Kant was a great thinker. He said one day, "Two things over- 
 whelm me — the starry world above and the moral order within." The heavens 
 declare the glory of God; the moral order declares the character of God. The 
 sense of "ought," of personal accountability to God, the giving account to God 
 of the deeds done in the body, is in the fiber of the soul. To be is to be 
 accountable to God. It is wrought into the fiber of man if duty is what is due, 
 and what is due grows out of the relations, and relations express the sum total 
 of human life. Because the universe is what it is, because you arc' what you 
 are when you come into the universe, you enter into relation, and out of rela- 
 tion comes duty, and duty clamors for what is dvie. When a child is born into 
 a family, it comes into relation to the father, the mother; it grows up face to 
 face with certain duties that grow out of these relations. When the child 
 enters school he enters other relations and other duties. When the man stands 
 at the altar and pledges himself to the woman he has chosen for his wife, he 
 •assumes other duties. When the blessing of God crowns the union, he assumes 
 other relations, other duties. Life is summed up in duties. When the sense 
 of duty is begun, when the relations are properly cared for, you have the ideal 
 family. 
 
 All great teachers, Confucius in China, Buddha in India, etc., are great 
 because they assumed obligation. Christ tells us to do certain things. He 
 said, "These things ye ought to have done," basing his whole appeal to con- 
 science, not to the emotions or feelings. The emotions are injurious and 
 dangeroiis to follow sometimes. Too many people have been turned into the 
 kingdom of God with feeling.. When you have touched a man's conscience, 
 when you have appealed to his sense of "ought," you have laid the right foun- 
 dation. Right is right, and has been since God is God, and right must win. 
 Whether men's emotions respond or not, whether men's sentiments are stirred 
 or not, the question is whether it is right or wrong. If it is wrong, quit it; if 
 right, do it. When we come into the world we come into two sets of relations 
 — relations with men and relations with God. 
 
 What the world needs is absolute justice in the relation of men to men. 
 "What ye would that others would do to you, do ye so to them." Put yourself 
 in the other man's place. You, who have domestic servants, put yourselves 
 into the kitchen problem. Demand nothing that you would not want to grant 
 if you were in the servant's place. If you are a domestic, then put yourself 
 into the parlor problem, and do as you would have desired to be done by, if 
 you had been in the parlor. 
 
 If you are an employer, treat the men under you as you would want to be 
 treated if you had exchanged places. We measure all the relations of life 
 by the justice of man to man. Organized capital and organized labor will 
 grind themselves to powder until there is justice between man and man mani- 
 fested, until men reach the place where men treat each other with a spirit of 
 justice. Many a man tries to heal the heart that injustice has made sore, by 
 the salve of mercy. If men were absolutely just in their dealings one with 
 another, no appeal for the oil of mercy to salve the wounds that injustice made 
 
 26 
 
Bible Conference Addresses 
 
 would be necessary. We ought to have been merciful. Ye ought to have faith. 
 I would not give a snap of the finger for faith that does not make faithful, for 
 a faith in God that is not strong enough to make one faithful in his obligation 
 to another — that kind of faith in Christians is disgusting. 
 
 But, is that not enough? If you are faithful and just and merciful toward 
 your fellow-men, will God ask more than that? Yes. Benedict Arnold, the 
 traitor, was a kind man in his family. I dare say the capitalist who throttles 
 labor is kind to his own children. A pair of shears is of no value if the two 
 blades are separated. The blades will not serve as knives, as they are not 
 shaped right for that purpose; they will not serve as gimlets, as they are not 
 twisted to serve as such; the handles are not shaped right for hammers. All 
 they are fit for is the scrap heap. The two blades have to work together. So 
 it is in respect to your duties to God and to man. To emphasize one or the 
 other is to ruin your Christian practice. You ought to do some things for your 
 fellow-men and some things for God. You never saw a disembodied spirit. 
 You never saw a disembodied religion. We are yet in the flesh, and, being in 
 the flesh, we must put oiir principles into visible forms — missions, buildings, 
 institutions. Jesus Christ was God manifested in the Christ, and every man is 
 an incorporation of spiritual forms. So Christian religion must incarnate 
 itself in institutions, buildings, paid offices; and all of us, in discharging our 
 obligations to God, must meet these requirements. When the Boers revolted 
 against the British, the British government sent a visible army to conquer a 
 visible rebellion. We must conquer the devil by visible money. Prayer is no 
 substitute for giving. Scripture reading is no substitute for giving. Kindly 
 feeling is no substitute for giving. There is no suhstitute for giving. 
 
 Now, what does money stand for? It is talent multiplied by time. It is 
 something you are born into. It belongs no more to you than the air belongs 
 to the bird, into which it is launched. It is simply God's opportunity for you 
 to serve him. Every man's organization is an output of God's thought, God's 
 pixrpose. Time is the gift of the eternal. Talent is the gift of the Creator. 
 The product belongs to God. He comes into your life and says, "Six days 
 shalt thou labor, but on the Sabbath thou shalt do no work," which is sacred 
 to the Lor'l thy God. He puts a mortgage over one-seventh of the time that is 
 covered. Why? In order that through that mortgage he may come into pos- 
 session of the rest of the property. 
 
 Then as to talent. We are told to give one-tenth of that. Through the one- 
 tenth he conquers yourself. Just as the trolley car receives its motive power 
 from the dynamo by the passage over the wire, so God permeates your business 
 life and gives you strength to serve him as you ought. He says, "This one- 
 tenth belongs to me." Woe to the man who plays false with his own conscience. 
 Woe to the man who begins to juggle with his conscience, for when the sense 
 of "ought" is dull, he cannot be trusted in anything. I want to base it on 
 conscience. The Christian conscience is as the Great System of the North- 
 west. What I want to do is to touch the nerve of the conscience. It is not a 
 question of feeling or emotion. Ye neglect the weightier matters of the law. 
 We ought to keep the weightier matters of the law. "Ye ought to tithe." 
 Now, we come to the practical application of it, for, when a man has decided 
 
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Union Biblical Seminary 
 
 that a thing is right, then the trouble often begins. In the church tliat I serve, 
 we began tithing by an appeal to the board of trustees. The trustees are often 
 like a brakeman on a train. The engineer must not bear heavy on the brakes, 
 nor must the congregation on the trustees. Wlien we brought it before the 
 trustees the first year, they said, "No, because we are on the edge all the time 
 anyway. We are afraid a step in the otlier direction will be a step into the 
 gulf." However, they said, "There is only one condition, and that is, if you 
 tithe, you will agree to not give less than you are giving now." That is faith 
 — faith in the business brains of a Christian church. So we took the pledge. 
 Any way to get in, we thought, and we kept it for a year, and they were per- 
 fectly amazed. The financial problem ran a great deal more smoothly. 
 
 The tithers found that they had i-eally been robbing God; so a great many 
 are giving more than the tithe now. Some people enjoy having fits of benevo- 
 lence. The first year, 1903, we had twenty-eight tithers, and we tvirned in 
 $1,256.60; the second year, twenty-five tithers, and turned in $3,440.27 — nearly 
 a thousand dollars more; in 1905, thirty-five tithers, and turned in $4,978; the 
 last year, thirty-seven tithers, and turned in $7,500; and now the trustees want 
 to organize a hallelujah chorus with the tithe for the theme. The way we get 
 at it is, first of all, to issue literature. The man who is most heartily in favor 
 of the tithe is an advertising agent. He believes in making a market. Any- 
 body can make goods. It takes a genius to make a market. A man took his 
 son Abraham to a Jewish clothing store, and said, "Isaac, take Abraham and 
 make a merchant of him." He kept him a week and sent him home. The man 
 went back and asked the Jew what was the matter. "Cannot he sell goods 
 when people want to buy?" The Jew answered, "Yes; any fellow can do that. 
 I want him to sell goods when nobody wants to buy." It takes more brains to 
 get the needle into the web than to thread it. Anybody can thread a needle. 
 It takes brains to get the needle into the web. It takes a seamstress. 
 
 Thomas Cade has issued several pamphlets, argumentative and illustrative, 
 in story form. The pamphlets were distributed. We simply called the people's 
 attention to them, and expressed the wish that they would read them. They 
 read them. I said, "I wish you would think about them." Many people use 
 reading as an opiate when they do not want to think. One and another began 
 to sprout up through this enlargement of soul. They came to me and said, 
 "Wlien shall we begin?" It is a great thing, brother minister, to get the initia- 
 tive from the pew; to work around a man in such a wny as to have your hand 
 on his l:)ack and yet make him think he is moving himself. After interest had 
 sprung up, we went to the trustees and asked the privilege of tithing. When 
 half a dozen people want a certain thing they are like a crying baby. The rest 
 of the family have to keep awake. We sang our song early and late. Each 
 one who began to tithe received a spiritual blessing. The window of heaven 
 opened. As they began to tithe they wanted more room for growth. They 
 touched others. I suppose by your name, "The United Brethren," you have no 
 differences of opinion in the organization. We drew up a tithing covenant 
 and we now have three forms of the covenants. You cannot use a patent 
 medicine for every member of the family, so you have to study each tempera- 
 ment. So we conceived three forms of tithing. [He then read the three forms 
 of tithing.] The different methods provide for personal idiosyncrasies, even 
 in Baptist churches. 
 
 Benediction bv Dr. S. S. Hough. 
 
 28 
 
Bible Conference Addresses 
 
 ftitiav &tnim. 
 
 The services opened by the congregation singing "Onward Christian Sol- 
 diers," "Life Time is Working Time," and "All to Jesus I Surrender." 
 
 The Evening Lesson. 
 
 Bij J. Camjjhell White. 
 Our evening lesson is from the fourteenth chapter of the Gospel by John, 
 •"Let not your heart be troubled," etc. 
 
 Prayer by Bishop Mathews. 
 
 O God, we thank thee for this beautiful chapter which has been read to us — 
 words from the lips of the beloved apostle John; words which have dried the 
 tears in the eyes of thousands and comforted the hearts of millions; words 
 that have been an inspiration to the church through all ages down to the pres- 
 ent time; words concerning the Fatherhood of God and the Sonship of Jesus 
 Christ and the personality of the Holy Spirit; words which are applicable to 
 us this night. O we thank thee for this sweet message that came from the lips 
 ■of the beloved apostle. And now, Holy Spirit, we are in thy dispensation. 
 Thou art presiding over the church. Thou art the administrator of the church. 
 Thou art the illuminator of the church. Thou dost cleanse away from us all 
 •doubt. Thovi dost bring us into vital union with Jesus Christ, our personal 
 Savior. Thou dost guide us into all truth if we are willing to be led by thee. 
 
 O Holy Spirit, wilt thou this night preside over this entire service, and 
 direct everything from the beginning to the end? That the reading of thy 
 Word may rest upon our conscience, upon our hearts, and sink into our very 
 soul, so we may treasure up these great truths which have been read by thy 
 servant in our hearing this evening; and, blessed Spirit, we thank thee for 
 suggesting to the minds of those who are in lead here in this Bible Confer- 
 ence, the calling to this place of these two noble representatives of their own^ 
 churches; representatives of the most intelligent, heroic, broad type of Chris- 
 tian life. O God, we thank thee for thy servant who comes from a far-away 
 city — a great spiritual leader, a mighty man ; not only from this city in the 
 far West (the great city where he magnified God and where God used him), 
 but in the city of the East where he brought men and women into the larger 
 vision of Christ; whom God is using to lead people into greater experience 
 
 29 
 
Union Biblical Seminary 
 
 with God and Christ, and to a larger spiritual vision of God, making him more 
 and more a blessing to every one of us. 
 
 And now, we thank thee for this noble and distinguished layman here and 
 others throughout this country as well as in other lands who preach the ever- 
 lasting triTth ; who is living it out in a beautiful life. We thank thee thou 
 hast brought him here to-night ; he has already given to us words of truth and 
 inspiration. Lord, bless him to-night and all who may speak to us, bearing to 
 us messages that lie upon their hearts and which will stir our consciences and 
 broaden our vision. Lead us to a better vision of responsibility and steward- 
 ship, and more heroic faith in Jesus Christ, as we go forward in the aggressive 
 world to hasten the coming of the kingdom of Jesus Christ in the earth. 
 
 Hear our prayers for the laymen of our church ; the laity of our church 
 everywhere in Christendom. We pray that thou wilt bring them to an affec- 
 tionate, thorough, and deep consecration of themselves, their time, their talent, 
 and their money to thee, that the light may shine everywhere, and that all may 
 unite their forces for the onward movement of thy kingdom in the earth, the 
 universal triumph of Jesus Christ, and for the recognition of thy final suprem- 
 acy over all the eai'th. 
 
 Wonderfully use these brethren who shall bear to us the messages that lie 
 upon their hearts and the thoughts that stir their brains, and the sentiments 
 and purpose that are within the scope of their conception. Lead us more and 
 more to cooperate with thee in all that pertains to the advancement and build- 
 ing up of thy kingdom, for it is not denominational glory, but Christ, the 
 Almighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace, that we should 
 emphasize — the God of man, our Leader, Brother, our Friend, our Savior, the 
 King — and, when we cooperate with him, then his kingdom shall advance 
 rapidly in the earth. 
 
 O Lord, help us to put upon thy brow to-night, in sermon, meditation, 
 prayer, and offering, a crown that shall be worthy of thy brow. We ask it not 
 that we are worthy, but because of the infinite worthiness of thyself. Amen. 
 
 Preliminary Speech by J. Campbell White. 
 
 The chief thing to do is set every man to work in his own congregation and 
 conununity, and then, along the line of gifts, to work toward the ideal of 
 having every one give every week on the basis of at least one-tenth of his 
 income. That has been taken as a sort of watchword or motto for the Men's 
 Movement, about which we shall have more to say in the meeting to-morrow 
 afternoon. 
 
 There are four things laid down by the Bible. The first is, lift up your 
 eyes and look on the field, and get an intelligent knowledge of the conditions. 
 This is the very first requisite if we are going to pray and pay together. The 
 other three obligations that are so clearlv laid down in the Scripture are 
 "pray," "go," and "pay." 
 
 Three out of every four in America are outside of the membership ; two out 
 of three of all the people in the world are in non-Christian nations; and the 
 overwhelming majority are outside of the reach of any messenger of Jesus 
 Christ. 
 
 30 
 
Bible Conference Addresses 
 
 Talking about money, sometimes people get the idea that the main thing 
 we are to give to God is our money. The money is a very subordinate thing. 
 Other things are more vital, that go much further to the heart of life. Some- 
 times we think if we give God a reasonable faith he will conquer this world 
 through us. When we give him our faith we will surely give him our love and 
 our purpose to cooperate with him and our prayers that his kingdom may 
 come, and our personal influence upon every life that we can touch. After 
 that it is a very easy thing to give our money. 
 
 The man who painted that chart was very much struck with the fact that 
 we put five things before money. The chart named showed the following : 
 
 r^ , r^ r !• His Love. 
 
 God's Contribution r> ^^^ ^^^ 
 
 TO THE \ o" jjjg gpiniT 
 
 World's Redemption [^ ^- ^^^ Word". 
 
 f 1. My Faith. 
 
 ,, ^ 2. My Love. 
 
 My Contribution j 3 ^^. ^^^^^^^^ 
 
 to THE j 4 j^^. Pjj^yERS. 
 
 World s Redemption | 5 j^j^. Influence. 
 [ 6 My Money. 
 
 There are other things more important than money. What he ought to do 
 with his personality is put it to the disposal of Jesus Christ. 
 
 Address by Doctor Gifford. 
 
 Text taken from the Gospel according to St. John, fourteenth chapter, last 
 clause, thirty-first verse, "Arise, let us go hence." 
 
 The son of David in the city of Jerusalem studied men and nature, and 
 noted that the generations follow^ed one after another in an endless proces- 
 sion; that the wind turns toward the north and then toward the south from 
 whence it came; that the rivers turn tow^ard the sea and turn again to the 
 springs that gave them birth; that all nature is w'orking and restless, but the 
 earth abides. We are wiser than the wise son of David in Jerusalem. We 
 know that the earth itself does not abide; that it turns on its own axis every 
 four and twenty hours; that it sweeps around the sun 1,080 miles a minute; 
 that this restless earth is always in motion from the center to the circum- 
 ference; there is not a particle or an atom that is at rest, from the core of the 
 movmtain to the fluttering leaf of the mountain-top; always everything is in 
 motion. Now and then we have an earthquake that shakes and startles us; 
 shifts only a few inches and a city disappears. About a year ago I stood on 
 the edge of the city of Gaza, in Palestine; looked down upon seven cities 
 buried one upon another and no earthquake shock had dethroned any city; 
 walked down through the wdnding way made by excavation, and realized that 
 century after century seven cities had arisen, proud in their day, powerless in 
 ours. From the top of Mt. Olivet the traveler looks down upon Jerusalem ; on 
 
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Union Biblical Seminary 
 
 a city which has been dethroned and crowned twenty-seven times. Twenty- 
 seven times the red tidal wave of war has swept over the glory of all nations. 
 But, even if there be no war, if there be perpetual peace, cities are disinte- 
 grating every few years. Dayton is changing while you watch ; the city abides, 
 but the buildings go. Citizens remain, but the individuals change. The 
 church remains, but not the same it was fifty years ago. Ceaseless change is 
 written on everything; perpetual motion in all the universe of God, without 
 haste, without rest. Every ounce of force awaits the call of Christ. "Arise, 
 let us go hence." 
 
 A great English preacher made the following statement: "The number of 
 waves required to produce red is 39,000 to the inch, or millions of millions in 
 a second; yellow, 44,000 to the inch, millions of millions in a second.' So it is 
 in all colors. To enable you to see a red rose it takes millions of millions of 
 ether waves to break upon your eyes every second. What a restless universe ! 
 It is not only true, of the dead earth beneath our feet, but of the living pil- 
 grimage of men. The man who struck the key-note of pure and undefiled re- 
 ligion was a pilgrim and a stranger ; he dwelt in tents ; but he dwelt in a city 
 whose Maker was God. 
 
 We come to Christ, the High Priest of our vision, who says, "Come unto 
 me, ye who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest." He cannot 
 give what he has not. His is a rest of faith in God and the perpetual motion 
 of men. "Take my yoke upon you." I see the plow; I see the straining 
 muscles; I see the bowed neck; I smell the turning earth. "Take my yoke 
 upon you and learn of me, for my yoke is easy" — but it is a yoke, not a ham- 
 mock. "My burden is light," but it is a burden, not a chariot. "I came that 
 ye might have light and have it more abundantly," and the cost of life is 
 action — action — action. The rest of faith is for service, not from service. 
 Eaith without works is dead. "Work out your own salvation with fear and 
 trembling, for it is God that worketh in you." The soldier who doubts his 
 commander skulks his duty; the soldier who believes in his captain follows him 
 to the hot breath of death. The kingdom of heaven is like leaven, which toils 
 by night while you sleep; it is like new wine in old wine-skins, which breaks 
 its fetters and wins its freedom; like seed which worketh while you sleep, 
 organizing dead earth into living form. These are the types of the kingdom 
 of God into which Christ calls us to service. 
 
 We come to the upper room. No ; before that we come to the Mount of 
 Transfiguration, where the glory hurst forth for a moment as the current 
 breaks through the incandescent light. Peter said, "It is good for us to 
 abide here; let us build three tabernacles"; and the transfigured Christ 
 veiled his face. We come now to the upper room on Mount Zion, within the 
 city walls. Christ turns the searchlight of history on the distant past, and, 
 as the light settles, we find a nation without rest; eager millions standing 
 under the portals of blood-stained lintels waiting, and at the midnight hour 
 the gate is lifted and the stream of life goes surging out, never to rest again; 
 and in that upper room the Master of rest is the only one that rests not. 
 Then follow the matchless words of his wonderful prayer. He lays bare the 
 very heart of God; he parts the veil, and, standing as the High Priest, he 
 communes with God and teaches how to pray by example; and, as the dis- 
 
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Bible Conference Addresses 
 
 ciples settle back, satisfied with the remarkable truth and the wonderful 
 prayer, he speaks to them one sentence: "Arise, let us go hence." There is 
 no place of rest for the highest type of living. Down from Zion's height, 
 across the bridge that binds the ages of Zion, \mder the platform against 
 which the great temple rests, out through St. Stephen's Gate to_ the Geth- 
 semane where the most awful agony of the centuries was — that is what he 
 went to. One hour the disciples were bending impatiently forward to catch 
 the message, and the next hour the same disciples were so far forgetful as to be 
 asleep; one hour the disciples were listening with bated breath while he 
 communes with God, and in the next hour asleep, while he sweats, as it were, 
 great drops of blood. Out from the Garden of Gethsemane, of agony and 
 struggle, came the words, "Arise, let us go hence." To Pilate's palace, to 
 look into the hard face of the Romans, and into the harder face of Jewish 
 cruelty, to be crowned with thorns, to be spit upon, to be clad in purple 
 mockery, to be scourged until the muscles quiver. Then, "Arise, let us go 
 hence." Under the crushing weight of the cross to meet the great Lord's 
 altar stairs that slope through darkness up toward God. Nailed to the cross, 
 rejected of earth, the earth shudders and the sun veils her face. That is 
 what he went to from the upper chamber of peace, for the world's redemp- 
 tion — went to a breaking heart; and then they take the broken body down 
 and lay it in Joseph's tomb. "Arise, let us go hence," for even death cannot 
 rest, and the angel comes, lest he forget, rolls away the stone, and _ God 
 speaks the word and he comes forth the resurrection and the life, with a 
 passion for service that he had never known, unmanacled by the flesh, to 
 work the world's redemption, appearing and disappearing for forty days. 
 Then, standing on the stepping-stone of Olivet, "I must arise and go hence." 
 Then the ten days passed, and the pierced palms turned to the gift of the 
 Holy Ghost; pours upon the hard world the gift of God's life which never 
 touched a soul yet to put it to sleep, but is as a mighty rushing wind that 
 seizes men and makes them tools in the hands of God ; and the risen Christ 
 stands at the right hand of God, ever living to make intercession for us — 
 head over all things, and now the church; head of the Roman Empire; head 
 of civilization; head of China; head of the British Empire; head of Japan 
 and the American Republic; head over all things in the church, formulating 
 a new civilization. Lift thine eyes to John's revelation of the things to see 
 in heaven. Great agencies are marshalling in mighty array. Then Christ 
 comes to the church by the Holy Ghost, and sends the fire of his light along 
 the insidated wire. "Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel;" "Lo, 
 I am with you alway," etc. The world is the field. "Go ye into all the world, 
 and preach the gospel." The Holy Ghost is brooding over a redeemed world. 
 To be a member of the body of Christ is to be controlled through and 
 through with the life of Christ. To-night at dinner I sat with friends and 
 ate meat and bread and vegetables. This was all dead matter; but within a 
 year it will be transformed into the energy of Christian service. To be a 
 member of the body of Christ is to have the red life-blood of Christ throbbing 
 through your arteries. 
 
 "Arise, let us go hence." Hence to your Mount of Transfiguration; hence 
 to the upper room of communion, to prayer and marvelous truth. Just out- 
 
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Unio7i Biblical Seminary 
 
 side the closed door awaits your Garden of Gethsemane ; outside of Geth- 
 semane awaits your Pilate's palace, your city of Golgotha; beyond your res- 
 urrection, the gift of the Holy Ghost. ^, . . j • ^. 
 
 All the life and power and energy of Jesus Christ is wrapped up m the 
 life that is a credit to him. Rest in faith; rest in faith for service. Oh, how 
 I can work for the man I believe in ! My rest is m my confidence m him, 
 not in substituting laziness. So Christ comes to you, my brother and, ever- 
 more as he looks into your face is the sentence, "Arise, let us go hence. 
 
 I remember when I was getting my education 1 went from a store m JNew 
 York to a boarding school in Connecticut. I had not looked into a book for 
 six or seven years, but at the end of two years of bitter work I had gotten so 
 I could read Latin and do a great deal in mathematics. Then I- wanted to 
 go back to my boarding school to have an easy time, but the call came, 
 "Arise let us go hence." So I came to the university life, and, after four 
 years of strenuous struggle there, T came to the point I could master book 
 after book, I was ready for a rest; but the university turned her back on me 
 and said "Arise, let us go hence." So T went to the seminary, and when 1 
 could master theology and exegesis, the theological faculty shut me out of 
 doors and said, "Arise, go hence." That is the lesson of life. So it is with 
 human life. So it is with spiritual life. It seems to be a bitter ordeal through 
 which the church is to struggle for the keeping of the Word of God. Thank 
 God that the Spirit of the living God will not let you sleep. 
 
 "Arise, let us go hence." It is the call of Christ to his church. My breth- 
 ren the one thing I dread inconceivably more than anything else is that the 
 time may come in my life when Christ shall pass me by and shall no more 
 say "Arise, let us go hence," because I have reached the point when I am 
 not' worth urging. I had rather die first. And, wherever you and I are called, 
 my brethren in the ministry, the Master himself comes to us always and 
 calls "Arise, let us go hence." Wherever the Master calls, there by the cross 
 of God I call follow and suffer. O infinite God, lift upon us the light of thy 
 countenance. Fill us with the dynamic energy of the Holy Ghost, and 
 throw us into the far-flung battle line, into the front of the struggle, for 
 Christ's sake. Amen. 
 
 Song, by the congregation, "Stand up, stand up for Jesus, ye children of 
 
 the Cross." 
 
 Benediction by Doctor Gifford: May Christ's mercy and peace abide 
 
 with us. ..... 
 
 Chart, ♦'What Money Will Accomplish." 
 
 Weekly In a Year In a Generation 
 
 % .15 will evangelize 4 heathen or 128 
 
 .25 will evangelize 6 heathen or 214 
 
 .50 will evangelize 13 heathen or 429 
 
 1.00 will evangelize 26 heathen or 858 
 
 2.00 will evangelize 52 heathen or 1716 
 
 5.00 will evangelize 130 heathen or 4290 
 
 10.00 will evangelize 260 heathen or 8580 
 
 20.00 will evangelize 520 heathen or 17160 
 
 30.00 will evangelize 780 heathen or 25740 
 
 ' 34 
 
Bible Conference Addresses 
 
 PKAY 
 
 -^ 
 
 -^^ G( 
 
 PAY 
 
 EVERY ONE WORKING 
 
 EVERY ONE 
 G 
 
 JE ,^ 
 IVING ^ 
 
 >^^ EVERY 
 ",J* WEEK 
 
 AT LEAST x'^ 
 
 35 
 
Union Biblical Seminary 
 
 Different Ways of Hearing. 
 
 C A RELESS 1 H ALF-HeABTED ^ 
 
 VNo Result V Unproductive 
 
 Indifferent J Worldly J 
 
 Pretentious I 
 
 > Temporary 
 Emotional ) 
 
 Honest I Large and 
 
 ^ f Abiding 
 
 Obedient J 
 
 36 
 
Bible Conference Addresses 
 
 ^aturliap aborning:. 
 
 Saturday, May 5, 1906. 
 The Bible Conference convened at 9:00 a.m. by the singing of the songs, 
 "No, not one," and "There is power in the blood." 
 
 Address by J. Campbell White. 
 
 Ch n'stia n Stt wa rJs/tip. 
 
 In any question affecting the development of Christianity or the establish- 
 ment of the kingdom of God, or any other question on which it speaks, an 
 ounce of Bible is worth a ton of anything else. I had this illustrated in my 
 experience frequently in India when I worked among non-Christians. I have 
 seen it do in a minute what hours of argument failed to do; and as a demon- 
 stration of the supernatural character of the word of God, I have not had any- 
 thing that equaled it. I could talk to a Hindoo or Mohammedan for hours to 
 get him to see things, and finally a single shaft from the word of God seemed 
 to overcome his obstacles and pierce him to the very center. In all the ques- 
 tions affecting our relation to God, in the giving of ovir life first of all, and 
 then all that we possess, we need to constantly study for ourselves the Word 
 of God. This morning I am going to give you quite a number of passages 
 that I think might be helpful to have jotted down to use some time in the 
 congregations to which you speak. 
 
 The extension of God throughovit the world demands many times the 
 amount of money that God is receiving for that work. It is not a whit less 
 true for the development of Christian character to the plane where God wants 
 to bring it. We need to give. It is utterly impossible for the church of Christ 
 to become what he wants it to become without putting itself at his disposal. 
 One of the perils of the church is the peril of not learning to hold ourselves and 
 our possessions at God's disposal. There is no telling what we are coming to. 
 
 The only way the church can be saved through and through is by putting 
 itself and its possessions at God's disposal. All God's plans fit perfectly. It 
 is necessary that we give money that his work may go on. God would not 
 have made it necessary unless it were absolutely essential to life. He knew 
 about the gold mines of California and Alaska, and he might have opened 
 them for the missionaiy treasurers if he had wanted to. If he had wanted it 
 done that way, he himself would have given it; but he wants us to give, and we 
 cannot become what God wants us to be unless we do it. He wants us to do it 
 gladly. 
 
 Yesterday we considered the principle of proportion in giving. This is vital 
 and essential ; but in this morning's service I want to call your attention to some 
 
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Union Biblical Seyninary 
 
 other Scriptural principles. First of all, remember that money is a means of 
 service. You might put that down for a number of texts. Money is a means of 
 serving God. We recognize that God wants us to put in all the power that we 
 have, and all the service of which we are capable. I am very glad for the defini- 
 tion which Doctor Gilford gave us of money : "Talent multiplied by time equals 
 money." Both your time and your money belong to God. A man after work- 
 ing a week goes home with $10 in his pocket. He goes home with a week's 
 worth of himself. If I were to say to you people that a new discovery had 
 been brought to light by which you could go over to Africa and China in half 
 an hour, spend a day, and come back in half an hour, and that you could then 
 go back to your work, some would be inclined to do it. That discovery has not 
 been made yet in an airship, but has been made in another way. 1 was very 
 glad for what Professor Clippinger said concerning the investment of life. 
 It is not money we want ; it is life. How much does God want us to put at his 
 disposal? I was supported ten years in India by one man. He was very 
 anxious to do everything he could to extend the kingdom of God over the 
 world. His belief is that the Lord is going to come back into this world as 
 soon as he can, and his coming depends upon our obedience. He wants to see 
 him come back in his own lifetime. He may come to-day. I am not sure. I 
 do not know what is necessary in order that he may come back. This gospel 
 shall be preached in all the world. I believe it depends upon our obedience in 
 spreading this gospel over all the world; in wanting to have Christ's approval 
 when he does come. The man who paid all my salarj^ while I was in India I 
 found out was supporting a half dozen other people in other parts of the world. 
 Suppose he had found out at any time when I was out in India that I was 
 wasting my time. He wovild have gotten some one else. I was foolish enough 
 to think he expected me to do all that I coiald. In other words, I did not sup- 
 pose that God would be satisfied with 60, 75, 90 per cent, of my power, but 
 really wanted me to give 100 per cent, of my power to him. I came back to my 
 country, and am now living in the midst of a Christian community, and have 
 a family under Christian surroundings. Has my obligation dropped down to 
 50 per cent. ? Does God only want one-half as much as when I was in India ? 
 Or does he still want me to give 100 per cent. ? Is there any particular differ- 
 ence between you and me in the world ? What per cent, of our power for 
 service does God expect? I wish a good many people would think that thing 
 through and then decide honestly what proportion they are actually giving. 
 Head the passage, T. Tim. (i :17, 18 : "Charge them that are rich in this world, 
 that they be not highminded, nor trust in uncertain riches, but in the living 
 God, who giveth us richly all the things to enjoy; that they do good, that they 
 be rich in good works, ready to distribute, willing to communicate." It be- 
 longs to us all to do good with financial power as well as every other power. 
 
 Turn to I. John 3 :17. He says we ought to lay down our lives for the breth- 
 ren. "Whoso hath this world's good, and seeth his brother have need, and 
 shutteth \ip his bowels of compassion from him," how can the Jove of God 
 abide in that kind of a man? It is the strongest way God has of saying it 
 cannot be there. It is a very searching fact, but it is a fact. 
 
 Matthew 6:19 to 21: Here is a definite command. "Lay not up for your- 
 selves treasures upon earth, where moth and dust doth corrupt, and where 
 
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Bible Conference Addresses 
 
 thieves break through and steal: but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, 
 where neither moth nor dust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break 
 through nor steal : for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." 
 How can we do that without putting our personality, represented by our 
 ruoney, at God's disposal, for the redemption of men who will ever rejoice with 
 us in the eternal fellowship with God ? 
 
 Look at Luke 16 :9 : "Make to yourselves friends by means of the mammon 
 of unrighteousness; that, when it shall fail, they may receive you into the 
 eternal tabernacles" (R. V.). What does that mean? Doctor Goucher, of 
 Baltimore, at a great public meeting in Cleveland, said that a man he knew 
 invested $100,000 in one district in India, and as a result of that investment 
 50,000 men and women had united with the church ; only two dollars to bring 
 each man to an open confession of Christ. Surely thousands of these people 
 will, in the eternal habitation, welcome and express their gratitude to the man 
 who made that investment. Is not that making friends by means of the mam- 
 mon of unrighteousness, that, when that shall fail, they shall receive you in the 
 eternal habitation? There the thing is stated in black and white, as the thing 
 to do with financial power. 
 
 Look at Romans 10:13: "Whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord 
 shall be saved. How then shall they call on him in whom they have not be- 
 lieved ? and how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard ? . . . 
 How shall they preach except they be sent ?" Are we sending the men who will 
 preach the messages that the people may be saved ? It is God's argument, not 
 mine. Money is a means of service. 
 
 See I. Tim. 6 :7 : "For we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain 
 we can carry nothing out. And having food and raiment let us be here- 
 with content. But they that will be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and 
 into many foolish and hurtfid lusts, which drown men in destruction and per- 
 dition. For the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil: which while 
 some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves 
 through with many sorrows." About the risk of living for that kind of an 
 object, our Lord went to the heart of this problem. How shall they that have 
 riches enter into the kingdom of God? 
 
 Deut. 17:17: "Neither shall he greatly multiply to himself silver and gold." 
 Eccl. 5 :13 : "There is a sore evil which I have seen under the sun, namely, 
 riches kept for the owners thereof to their hurt." It is a good thing to warn 
 young men especially of the danger of living this kind of a life. Giving is a 
 grace. Further than that, it is a means of grace and the measure of grace. 
 We will all realize the truth of Doctor McClaren's striking statement, "Giving 
 is essential to the completeness of Christian character. It is the crowning 
 grace, because it is the practical manifestation of the highest excellences. It 
 is the result of sympathy, unselfishness, of contact with Christ, of the drinking 
 in of his spirit." There is a good deal of reason for regarding giving not only 
 as a grace, but as the crowning grace. God loveth a cheerful giver. Why? 
 I suppose because that man is becoming godly. When Christ laid down his 
 life, the special point to be brought oiit is that he did it cheerfully. When we 
 lay down our possessions cheerfvilly, we are doing as he did. God loves a cheer- 
 ful giver. He loves to see his own image reproduced in us. 
 
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Union Biblical Seminary 
 
 Prov. 11 : 25 : "The liberal soul shall be made fat : and he that watereth shall 
 be watered also himself." And II. Cor. 9:6: "But this I say, He which soweth 
 sparingly shall reap also sparingly; and he which soweth bountifully shall 
 reap also bountifully." Also Malachi 3 :10 : "Bring ye all the tithes into the 
 storehouse, that there may be meat in mine house, and prove me now here- 
 with, saith the Lord of hosts, if I will not open you the windows of heaven, 
 and pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be room to receive it." It is 
 indeed true that a man can purchase, if he is willing to piit his money in, 
 great joy and blessing from God. "Give, and it shall be given unto you." 
 
 Luke 6 :38 : "Give, and it shall be given unto you ; good measure, pressed 
 down, and shaken together, and running over, shall men give into your bosom. 
 For with the same measure that ye mete withal it shall be measured to you 
 again." I. John 3:17: "But whoso hath this world's good, and seeth his 
 brother have need, and shutteth up his bowels of compassion from him, how 
 dwelleth the love of God in him?" The measure of God's love will be the 
 measure of our open-handedness. What does this suggest ? If giving is a grace, 
 if it is a means of grace, if it is the measure of grace, is it not important that 
 all members of our congregations be developed in this as a vital point of their 
 spiritual life? The whole thought of God in appealing for money is that men 
 may be in their right relation to him; they must give to express the love which 
 they ought to have for him. If that is so, when we ask for money we are not 
 beggars, but benefactors; so let us have no more talk of begging for money. 
 When we get a man in the right attitude, we are doing him possibly the great- 
 est service we can render hira. In our church it used to be thought that the 
 head of the family could do the whole thing ; but a man might just as well try 
 to do all the praying for the family as to think he can give for all. The grace 
 of giving is just as important in the development of Christian character as 
 prayer. I have five little children that go with their offering, and they would 
 feel just as comfortable going without their shoes on as not to go with their 
 gift. It is not a hard thing for them to give. Every child in the homes of our 
 families ought to be taught in the same way. Every reasonable means ought 
 to be used to lead evei-y one to give. We ought not to be satisfied when the 
 accounts are square. That is the smallest end of it. The question is. Are the 
 people getting the benefit of giving as the result of exercising this grace ? The 
 officers of the church ought to know to a certainty just what the people are 
 giving, and just what ones are not giving. They owe it to the people that they 
 should exhaust all reasonable means to get them to give systematically and 
 proportionately. 
 
 What is the best method ? I have no hesitation in saying that, after proper 
 public instruction has been given in this matter, the best method is for a com- 
 mittee of three to go to absolutely every member of the congregation and ask 
 for a weekly offering for the whole work of God. We used to be satisfied by 
 just having somebody go to everybody. It is a great deal better than simply 
 passing the hat in the congregation — that is, the coming face to face with 
 some other Christian. After a while we found out that two persons asking the 
 others was better than one; but for a canvass of this kind three are a great 
 deal better than two. The secret of the success of the three is this : If you 
 send one man to another for money, he may or may not succeed in getting 
 
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Bible Conference Addresses 
 
 anything ; if you send two men to the same man, they will get something ; and, 
 if you send three men to that same man, they will get whatever they ask for. 
 If three men come to your house, they are likely to get whatever they are after. 
 Why not use common-sense business methods? 
 
 Do not let any one go for the offering if he says he does not want to be a 
 beggar, who does not realize the dignity and divine character of it. Do not let 
 him spoil the whole work by going in the spirit of a beggar. 
 
 Is there any divine authority for suggesting that the three men go together? 
 "If you fail to win your brother alone, take with you one or two others." How 
 many of our congregations have had that kind of a test? How* many have been 
 canvassed, including all- the children in the homes? A committee of three 
 prayerfully going out to impress on the people that blessing which could not 
 come to them unless they fulfilled these conditions, you may say is a hard 
 thing to do. God does not take an easy way to accomplish his work. He would 
 have evangelized the world in another way, if he had wanted it to be done 
 an easy way. You cannot take a man to a college and pour knowledge into 
 him. It is the process that does the business. You cannot make a Christian 
 in any slipshod, short-cut way. No man can engage in this work without far 
 greater blessings coming into his life than the amount of energy invested. 
 
 Of course, it will take time. Nothing of any profit comes to the kingdom of 
 God but has time, energy, and life-blood. The question is, whether we are 
 willing to put our life into it. There are fourteen millions of Sabbath-school 
 children in the United States. If each one would give five cents each week, it 
 would make thirty-six millions of dollars. The whole church is giving some- 
 thing like seven millions to foreign missions. We are trifling with the whole 
 job yet. I asked yesterday for a statement of just how much this denomina- 
 tion is giving to the whole work of God, abroad and at home, and I have here 
 a statement from Mr. Whitney. It totals $200,000 — average per member, 77 
 cents a year for all missionary purposes. Do you mean to say that exhausts 
 the possibilities? Is there not an opportunity for more thorough cultivation? 
 
 I want to call attention to another great spiritual principle here — the crime 
 of covetousness. Generally when a man is covetous we say he is close-fisted. 
 We do not use the terms the Bible does. We say he is rather tight; rather 
 close. What does God say about that ? One of the ten most important com- 
 mandments is, "Thou shalt not covet." In the tenth psalm, third verse, are 
 the words, "The covetous, whom the Lord abhorreth." 
 
 Turn to Romans, first chapter, twenty-ninth verse. You cannot find any 
 list of criminals in the New Testament with the covetovis man left out. Turn 
 over, if you will, to I. Corinthians, sixth chapter, ninth and tenth verses. The 
 tenth verse says, "Nor tliieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor 
 extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God." Heligion with covetousness 
 is not consistent with Christian character. 
 
 Turn to the twelfth chapter of Luke, fifteenth verse: "Take heed and be- 
 ware of covetovisness," etc. I think we are doing a very serious thing unless 
 we make perfectly clear to all our members the tendency of covetousness. 
 
 One other thing. Giving should be as worship ; to be acceptable to God, we 
 cannot just put so much money in the treasiiry of God; we must put it in in 
 the right spirit. See Prov. 3 :9 ; Malachi 3 :10. 
 
 41 
 
Union Biblical Seminary 
 
 Sometimes the church treasury becomes short of funds. Some man is to 
 collect money, if possible. He meets a man on a load of hay and says, "Here, 
 you are not paid up ; I want you to give me five dollars." If the man gives 
 him the five dollars, i' is no benefit or value to his soul. God wants the thing 
 to be done in the rigb • way, in order that we may get the right profit out of it, 
 every week. See passage I. Corinthians, sixteenth chapter, second verse: 
 "Upon the first day of the week let every one of you lay by him in store, as 
 God hath prospered him," etc. ; every one to give every week. I believe the 
 idea of every one giving every week is perfectly right. If we really pray every 
 time we say, "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done in all the world," it will be 
 hard to not give to all the world. I would a great de^il rather a man who has 
 only fifty-two cents to give would give one cent on each Sabbath than that he 
 should give it all at once. His heart will be drawn out fifty-two times, instead 
 of once. That is the way for spiritual growth. 
 
 Many congregations have adopted the plan of a weekly offering to the entire 
 work of God. You will never solve your missionary problem unless you do 
 that. I want to give you a testimony of what I have seen. I have seen a can- 
 vass made with a committee of three, with the result that missionary offerings 
 increased from fifty per cent, to several hundred per cent. I do not think 
 you will ever solve the problem until you put it on the weekly basis. Ask the 
 congregation to make a weekly pledge, and every member give some regular 
 amount. If your annual conference were to approve certain estimates 
 each year, and by taking, as we take, a weekly subscription to the whole 
 missionary work, each person would know he was giving to the whole 
 work in the world — every week praying, working, and giving to the 
 whole woi'ld. Try to get everything done on the weekly subscription 
 basis. Put an envelope into the hands of every person, or the best thing to do 
 is to give every one fifty-tWo envelopes, one for each Sabbath in the year, and 
 on every envelope a niunber and the date. The treasurer keeps the account by 
 numbers. These envelopes are placed in a larger envelope, or rather a box, 
 and hung up at home. My wife was short of money last month. Toward the 
 end of the month she went to pay up all the weekly envelopes. She found 
 there were three empty envelopes; she had not paid for three Sabbaths. In 
 that way you know where you are; you know just what every one has pledged. 
 It takes a little while to work into the habit of paying every Sabbath, but it 
 would not be so easy to get into tbe habit of paying on the 15th of each June, 
 or the first Sabbath of each month. I cannot find any Scripture authority for 
 the first Sabbath of every month. I do not thinlv you and I are going to im- 
 prove on God's plan. I believe God has as much business sense as any one 
 else. When I find a suggestion of God's, it has more weight with me than all 
 the bvisiness men's on earth. If the oflicers of the church are determined that 
 it shall fail, then it generally fails. Otherwise, it succeeds marvelously. The 
 plan will not only multiply the offerings, but will multiply the spiritual life, 
 which is a definite proof that it is the right thing. 
 
 One further word. God not only wants a tithe, but he wants all we can 
 give. In regard to divine ownership, see Psalm 50:10: "For every beast of 
 the forest is mine, and the cattle upon a thousand' hills." Also Psalm 24 :1 : 
 "The earth is the Lord's, and the fulness thereof; the world, and they that 
 
 42 
 
Bible Conference Addresses 
 
 dwell therein"; and, "Ye are not your own. Ye are bought with a price," etc. 
 Also, Acts 4:32: "Neither said any of them that aught of the things which 
 ]\e possessed was his own ; but they had all things conmion" ; and T. Corin- 
 thians 10 :31 : "Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all 
 to the glory of God." No one of us is getting the blessing out of his Chris- 
 tian life unless actually making sacrifices. I do not believe God is satisfied with 
 our giving simply the tithe. 
 
 Three or four years ago I learned an important lesson. I was about to spend 
 a small amount one day ; I don't know now whether it was ten cents or twenty- 
 five cents. I do not even remember the thing I was going to buy. The ques- 
 tion came to me, "Is this the best investment of this money? Do you con- 
 sider this is in harmony with yovir life purpose?" And, instead of buying the 
 thing, which was not essential, I gave the money to God. It did not occur to 
 me that it would ask itself again ; but the next day the question came up 
 again, "Is this the highest use to which you can put this money?" So it came 
 to me asking itself sometimes several times a day, and it has been asking itself 
 ever since. I hope it will go on asking itself. I hardly step on a street car 
 without asking myself whether it is really wise economy to spend God's money 
 in that way. In giving things up for God I discovered a sweetness in fellow- 
 ship with Christ such as I had never known before. I believe that all Chris- 
 tians are missing a great deal if not deliberately giving up for Christ's sake. 
 I believe he counts what we do, and what we do without, for his sake, and, if 
 our love is like his, I think it will lead us to say with reference to every nickel 
 that we spend, "Is this the best that we can do with it?" I have no right to 
 misuse God's money. It is not a question of how much money I will give to 
 God, but how much I will keep for myself. How much love have we ? We can 
 decide that by what we are doing with our possiessions. 
 
 (♦^ 
 
 Prayer. 
 
 Our divine Redeemer, we thank thee for the grace which made it possible 
 for thee, though rich, to become poor. Thanks be unto thee for thy unspeak- 
 able gift. We pray we may have the Christian spirit in our giving. 
 We pray that we may not be able to withhold anything from thee. 
 Lord, has that included all that we control? Have we really surrendered 
 to thee ? Are we really ready to go anywhere ? Have we piit down our posses- 
 sions at thy feet as a gift ? We do not know what thou wilt ask of us. Thou 
 hast said, "Go into all the world and preach the gospel," and we have been 
 doing it at the rate of seventy-seven cents a year. Wilt thou forgive us, and 
 wilt thou show us how we can do a great deal better than this, and that when 
 thovi dost make a suggestion to us out of thy Word we may take it as final 
 authority? O Lord, may we learn of thee how to do thy work. Thou hast 
 planned this whole thing from the beginning. Thou dost know the conditions 
 under which it can be done perfectly. May we reject instantly everything 
 that is not of thee. May we venture on thy authority to do the things thou 
 liast said we shall do, not hesitating, wondering whether it will work or not. 
 
 43 
 
Union Biblical Seminary 
 
 We hold thee responsible. We pray that we may be faithful and obedient. 
 We thank thee for thy divine wisdom in solving the things we could not solve 
 ourselves. We would be in a terrible condition if, after looking up, we fail to 
 take the way that thou showest is the best way. We pray that in this matter 
 of love we may give an absolute surrender to Jesus Christ. Wilt thou give us 
 wisdom as we think over these things, may new life come unto us, and may we 
 reveal to those to whom we minister the thought that has come to us this day. 
 Lord Jesus, may every heart abound in mercy, and, whether other people do 
 all we think they should do or not, may every one of us give account of him- 
 self. May every one act independently, and may our purpose be to do hon- 
 estly with our whole heart the thing God makes clear ought to be done, as in 
 that way thou wilt work through us in a far more mighty way than we dared 
 hope for, that thy will may be done all over America. We thank thee that thou 
 dost love every man as well as any other. May we give every 7iian a fair 
 chance. May our whole thought be to press the whole kingdom into the whole 
 world, without any friction, because of absolute unity of heart with thee. 
 What an infinite honor it is that we are lo be thy channels to accomplish thy 
 mighty purposes. Fill us with a sweet sense of the divine nature of our 
 work, expecting absolute victory. We ask it all in Jesus' name. Amen. 
 
 44 
 
Bible Conference Addresses 
 
 featurbap jafternoon. 
 
 Saturday, May 5, 1906. 
 
 Bible Conference convened at 2:30 p.m. Song, "Thou thinkest, Lord, of 
 me," followed by the Arion Quartet. 
 
 Mr. White read from the fifteenth chapter of John : "I am the true vine, 
 and my Father is the husbandman. Every branch in me that beareth not 
 fruit he taketh away : and every branch that beareth fruit, he purgeth it, that 
 it may bring forth more fruit," etc. 
 
 I had a letter from a friend in London a few weeks ago, who was inclined to 
 be very careless in her religious life, who said, "I am anxious to have the 
 poetry of life now; will be willing to have the prose after while." That is a 
 fearful misunderstanding of what spiritual life ought to mean. There is no 
 spiritual life apart from Him. In the revival in India, people were so hilarious 
 with spiritual joy that they almost went into ecstasy. The crowd of lepers 
 there, with hands and parts of their bodies dropping off (they could not stand 
 by themselves), were leaning \ip against the wall and joining in overflowing 
 praise to God — such a scene as could not be described. We do not know 
 how much joy God wants to put into our lives. "This is my commandment, 
 that ye love one another as I have loved you." Love determines what we are 
 and what we do. Tell me how much any one loves, and I will tell you how 
 much he will do every time. "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man 
 lay down his life for his friend." "Ye are my friends, if you do the things I 
 command you." 
 
 Read from Ezekiel, thirty-third chapter, seventh verse: "So thou, O son 
 of man, I have set thee a watchman unto the house of Israel; therefore thou 
 shalt hear the word at my mouth, and warn them from me." Certainly these 
 passages emphasize the great obligation that rests upon us, upon every one, to 
 do the thing God wants done, in the warning of the wicked everywhere. Can 
 anything be more clear and plain than these teachings of the word of God? 
 Are we doing it ? May we have a season of prayer. 
 
 Prayer by J. Campbell White. 
 
 Search us, oh, we pray Thee, by the standards of thy word, so we may see 
 what thou dost expect of us, and show us any particulars in which we are dis- 
 
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Union Biblical Seminary 
 
 appointing- thee. Lord, save us from the mistake of planning our lives wrong 
 and. coming out in the end disappointed. We are sure that in the end nothing 
 will satisfy us that does not also satisfy thee. Help us, we pray thee, to live 
 with a great purpose to satisfy thee; to let thy will have right of way in our 
 lives; for it is the wisest will and most loving will in the universe. Thou hast 
 made no law for us that is not in our own interests; and only as we come into 
 obedience to thee can we possibly enter into those great realms of life and use- 
 fulness to which thou art calling us all. Sometimes we have misinterpreted 
 thee. We thank thee, Lord, for thinking thus of our future. Sometimes we 
 have thought we must stay away from thee in order to have a good time. We 
 thank thee thou hast overflowing joy for us, the overflowing joy of God, if we 
 will live in fellowship with thee and share thy purpose. We thank thee that in 
 thy presence there is fullness of joy. 
 
 Help us, we pray thee, to live in the heavenly places while here on earth as 
 pilgrims and strangers who are not settling down for eternity, but are on a 
 journey, doing what God wants done and looking forward to an eternal life of 
 service in thy kingdom. We thanls; thee there are so many things we can do 
 now; so many things thou hast trusted us to do. It is an infinite privilege 
 and honor, surely, to be sent out with the message of God's love to the world. 
 What a privilege it is to act as thine ambassadors ; to think thou hast a specific 
 place for us that no one else can fill so well. Every one of us has his place. 
 We thank thee thou art great enough to plan so minutely for every life. May 
 every one of us find thy plan; may thy church find thy plan and yield to 'it. 
 To this end may every one of us obey thee; obey to the limit of our light; even 
 attempt to do the things that seem utterly impossible because we dare to 
 reckon on God. 
 
 We pray that we may remind ourselves again, as thou hast told us, that 
 apart from thee we can do nothing, but that nothing is impossible to God, 
 and nothing is impossible to him that believeth; and so wilt thou help us to 
 an overmastering faith that will remove mountains of difiiculty, that works 
 miracles, that dares to go ahead in the path of duty, expecting God to do his 
 part. 
 
 O God, give us the open-heartedness, the sincerity, that will enable us to be- 
 lieve in thee. Help us to spend enough time in thy presence to get acquainted 
 with thee. Then we shall trust thee. Then we will be worthy of our places. 
 Many times things come in between thee and us, and our faith grows dim and 
 our lives weak and powerless. Facing the future, may we measure our possi- 
 bilities this afternoon. Help us to see thee. Give us the strength to solve 
 these problems, and help us to carry the burdens too heavy for us to carry 
 alone. 
 
 Wilt thou, we pray thee, above everything else, lead us into utter obedience 
 and trust in God ? Surcharge o\ir lives with God's presence, that there may 
 flow from us rivers of living water. 
 
 We thank thee for thy presence with us in previous sessions. We do not 
 want to go through without thy leadership. Wilt thou guide us in all speak- 
 ing this day? Disappoint us not, we pray thee. Help us to have the faith 
 that comes from thee — a great uplifting of the soul and outlook upon life, 
 and power from on high for the work that thou hast given us. So help us and 
 
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Bible Conferenee Addresses 
 
 guide us and impel us to do the things this afternoon that are in thy plan for 
 us on this occasion; and wilt thou make us willing to do unusual things if it 
 please thee, if that will more perfectly fulfill thy wise and perfect plan. We 
 feel like asking for the forgiveness of sins, for we cannot face thee without 
 seeing our own weaknesses and failures. We thank thee that thy blood covers 
 us. We pray we may be cleansed from the weakness of past failure. Keep us 
 from being in the bondage of evil. May we bring our very thoughts into the 
 obedience and captivity of Jesus Christ. May he be in reality our Master 
 and Lord, and may he dominate our lives absolutely according to his own 
 pleasure. We ask it all for his sake. Amen. 
 
 Address by J. Campbell White. 
 
 No man ever becomes great except by identification with some great cause. 
 The sum of all great causes in this world is the kingdom of Jesus Christ. It 
 includes all the other reforms, and instead of dealing with things piecemeal 
 and individually, is it not better that we should deal with the root of the diffi- 
 culty and thus solve the problem in its entirety and bring the world back into 
 fellowship with God ? Among all the great blessings I have to be thankful for, 
 I count one of the chief that when I was a student in college I was brought 
 face to face with the world's need and my own personal relation to that need. 
 I had never realized before that it is possible for every Christian to live with a 
 world-wide outlook and a world-wide sympathy and influence. And I came to 
 believe that it was not only a possible thing but an obligatory thing; that all 
 of us are living in a narrower sphere than Christ means for us to live in, un- 
 less our hearts, sympathies, and activities are reaching out to embrace the 
 whole problem that he came to solve. Christ said the world is the field. 
 This field is the church's and yours and mine, and Wesley went not a step too 
 far when he said, "I look upon the world as my parish." Christ means every 
 one of us to look upon the world as his parish. If we are to reincarnate the 
 Spirit of Jesus Christ in this world we dare not look upon any narrower 
 parish than that. It is not particular what part of the world a raan spends 
 his life in, if he gives it wholly to the complete accomplishment of the purpose 
 of Jesus Christ. I think that purpose will decide for him his place and em- 
 ployment, very largely. 
 
 I do not know who said it first, but I got the statement of Mr. McCon- 
 naughey, of the Presbyterian Board, and I pass it on to you that "the whole 
 business of the whole church is to preach the whole gospel to the whole world." 
 That is enough for you to think about for several months. It may be perfectly 
 familiar to yoii. "The whole business," not a part of it, "of the whole church," 
 not a little bit of it, "is to preach the whole gospel," touching every depart- 
 ment of it, "to the whole world," not any little corner of it. There is nothing 
 that will develop us in the way that identification with Christ will do. 
 
 One of the most encouraging things in my past ten years' experience has 
 been the observation of the effect upon men of throwing their lives into the 
 current of Christ's will, and seeing them just develop and open up like flowers 
 
 4 47 
 
Union Bihlical Seminary 
 
 under the pressure of that purpose. I think it is particularly manifested in 
 the lives of the young women who devote their lives to missionary service. 
 Over fifty of our lady missionaries working in Africa and India were only 
 ordinary people when they went out. They are not ordinary now. They are 
 marked people wherever they are found. Why? Identification with Christ in 
 the greatest purpose that can move any soul has made them great. 
 
 If you have an ambition to be great (and I hope you have in the highest 
 sense), then identify yourself with the greatest purpose of the great God. The 
 richest undeveloped asset in the church is her men. The women greatly out- 
 number the men in the membership of our churches and greatly outrank them 
 in the activity of the kingdom of God. Many are doing very little, but, taken 
 as a whole, they are doing a great deal more than the average man. Probably 
 the greatest problem confronting the church of the present day is to enlist, 
 arouse, and develop the latent power of the men to extend the work; to get 
 men to go into business for God; as William Carey said, when asked what his 
 business was, "My bvisiness is to serve the Lord, but I cobble shoes to pay 
 expenses." 
 
 A member of Gideon's band, who let their light shine, said people make fun 
 of him when he begins to talk religion in the cars and at the tables, and he 
 answers, "Religion is my business; not selling goods." He could not write his 
 own name when he was twenty-two, but he is doing more than most of us now. 
 Identification with the Cross is what makes a man. If we can in any way dis- 
 cover a plan by which to get men interested, it will be a long step toward 
 solving our problem. This is clear; God has a place in his kingdom for every 
 man; a man's work for every one to do. His kingdom cannot go on as it should 
 unless every one of us gives his best thought, energy, to this divine work. The 
 divine rule is, to every man his work, and not many men are busy at it, but, as 
 we observe, it is not entirely in every case the fault of the man who is a mem- 
 ber of the congregation, for I am persuaded that they are willing to do far 
 more than they know how to take hold of. 
 
 In the last few months I have been impressed, meeting men in our own 
 churches and getting into informal conversation with them about what they 
 ought to be doing, to find a restless, unsettled spirit among them, and a feeling 
 that the church ought somehow or other give them a larger opportunity of 
 service than they have. I have heard one man after another say he longed to 
 take hold, but did not know where to take hold. These are, I believe, honest, 
 sincere men. 
 
 It is inconceivable to me that God should plan our lives that the most of us 
 should be for most of our working hours doing something that is not a prepa- 
 ration for divine service. Most of us have to work at secular things eight or 
 ten hours a day. Do you suppose that that should not be a preparation for 
 Christian service? Is it not true that that thing is a preparation for other 
 service, and that the very principles that apply in ordinary business affairs 
 are the very principles which, if applied to the greatest business in the world, 
 would help us to carry this business forward in a better way? No business 
 firm will succeed unless it has a clearly defined purpose. We would not expect 
 a railway to build a track and get anywhere unless it laid down a plan and 
 followed it. We would not expect a man to put up a house fit to look at unless 
 
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Bible Conference Addresses 
 
 he had a plan and followed it. A man would not succeed in business unless he 
 outlined very clearly in his own mind exactly what he was going to undertake. 
 Is there a clearly defined purpose in our churches to-day? Ask the average 
 man what the church is for in the world, and what he would tell you (if we 
 can judge by his own attitude) is that the main thing a church is for is to give 
 him a place to go on Sabbath and get a little shaking up into a better life, and 
 a place where, before he leaves, they will pass the contribution plate and he 
 will have a chance to help pay the expenses. To occupy his seat and make his 
 contribution is about all he thinks he has to do. Have we given men clearly 
 an idea that the church of Christ is an army of conquest, that every man is a 
 soldier, that there is a man's wcft'k for him to do, that the work cannot go on 
 unless every man does his own share? Have we clearly defined the work so 
 that every man knows how to lift his part of the load ? I think a clear defini- 
 tion of what we are here for is one of the very first things we need. That is 
 the case in any well-managed business. The second thing is supervision. 
 The thing will not run itself. Its problems have to be thought through. In a 
 great store where there are hundreds of people employed, it would be a fear- 
 ful waste of power not to divide the work, plan it out, and have men at the 
 head whose chief work is the planning of work for other people to do. That is 
 the highest-paid labor in this country — the labor that is planning work for 
 other men; the men managers; the men in the lead, thinking out and setting 
 other men to work. You say the pastor is the leader of the congregation. 
 Yes. How much time does the average pastor give to the consideration of 
 plans by which other men are to work? There are a lot of pastors here this 
 afternoon. I wonder what proportion of your time is given to the planning 
 of work for other men to do. We are leaders, but most of us are doing most of 
 the work ourselves. It is not enough for the pastor to do his work. There 
 are other men in the congregation who are able to plan also, who have business 
 capacity, who have men working under their supei-vision in the business world, 
 and the greatest usefulness will be secured when these men plan work for 
 other men to do. There is no reason why there should not be a number of men 
 associated with the pastor in planning the work that everybody is to under- 
 take. 
 
 The third principle which we need is that of organization, without which 
 no business would succeed; every man assigned a specific part of the business 
 he is to do; every department of work looked after so that it will not fail. 
 How would a railway run if all the employees of the railway were bunched 
 together and told to now run the railway. I would not care to start back to 
 Pittsburg if things were run that way. I would probably find one of the men 
 whose work was with the pick and shovel, trying to run the engine. There is 
 no telling where he would run it. Every man must be in his own place. 
 Every man would be in the wrong place, I am afraid, if every man chose his 
 own place. Every man in a department store is chosen to be there because of 
 his ability to do the thing needed to be done there, and, as he becomes capable 
 through effort, he is promoted to a higher place where there are harder things 
 to do. 
 
 But we do not have an organization like that in the church; every depart- 
 ment looked after so that nothing suffers from not having each one definitely 
 
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Union Biblical Seminary 
 
 assigned to a specific place. The reason a great many men are idle in the 
 chvirch is that the work of the church is not divided into departments, as the 
 department store or railway system, and every man in the church with a place 
 assigned him. There should be these general leaders (call them what you 
 may), who are called the Board of General Supervision in our church, actually 
 assigning every man in the congregation a specific part of the work, after 
 studying his adaptability and capacity. "When this is realized, there will be no 
 drones anywhere so far as we can help it. It may be there are some in the 
 church so set in their way that it would take something remarkable to get 
 them to change. 
 
 If we set to the task of giving every man 'something to do and encourage 
 him in it, and making the new man an active force in the church, we have 
 that much clear gain in the kingdom of God. If we cannot get all, we should 
 get as many as we can, but be especially careful to get as many of the young 
 element of the church as we can. May the time come when every soldier is in 
 fighting condition. 
 
 The fourth principle is cooperation. Take this crowd this afternoon and 
 set them to work individually to do a certain task. They might get it done 
 after a while. If you organize them they will do it a great deal sooner, but 
 the divine principle is that every man shall act with the others, with a com- 
 mon purpose. In that way they will accomplish as much as ten men working 
 separately. What kind of a force in the world would we have if the 20,000,000 
 church-members in this country were actually acting as one in harmony and 
 organization for the redemption of souls' It woVild be simply irresistible. 
 God means that we shall cooperate in his work, and, best of all, he holds him- 
 self at our disposal and is one of the group that cooperate with one another. 
 "If two or three are gathered together in my name" to pray, or to fight, 
 "there am I in the midst of them." Are we using that principle sufficiently in 
 our church work ? 
 
 Now, we have tried to embody in our church those four principles — defini- 
 tion of purpose, organization of work, cooperation in service, and supervision 
 by competent leaders who plan and set all men of the church to work. 
 
 The first department of service mentioned is the department for promoting 
 intelligence. How many men would give acceptable answers to the questions 
 that might be asked concerning the work of the church? What kind of 
 answers would we give ? Some of you men are in business and charged with 
 the responsibility "to advertise" the business. All the skill necessary in the 
 business world is needed to advertise the kingdom of God. Every kind of 
 ability of this kind should be used in this business. Every inch of what is 
 learned in the bvisiness out in the world can be applied to the solution of the 
 church's problems. 
 
 The second department is that of finance. You men are dealing with money 
 from Monday to Saturday night. Is it not possible for these business men to 
 take hold of this financial problem and put the congregation on a business 
 standing too? Men would have a new sense of the dignity and value of the 
 whole kingdom of God if they would do this. 
 
 Third, a department for promoting friendliness, etc. Is it possible for a 
 stranger to come without a welcome? For any one not to be provided with a 
 
 50 
 
Bihle Conference Addresses 
 
 hymn-book? Is it possible for a family to move into yoiir neighborhood and 
 not call on them ? Do even the members of the church know one another ? A 
 lack of friendly interest in yoimg men and women may mean their ruin or the 
 presence of that interest their eternal salvation. 
 
 Fourth, the department for promoting habits of personal and family prayer 
 and Bible study, and also the work of the Sabbath school. What proportion 
 of the male members of our churches have the habit of sitting down every 
 day and reading a portion of the Scriptures in a systematic way? How many 
 cover the whole Bible in their reading? How many of the homes have a family 
 altar, where the family gathers each day for reading the Word of God? The 
 right kind of a committee can make those things almost universal. 
 
 Fifth, department for promoting individual Christian effort, and for work 
 among new converts. 
 
 Sixth, department for promoting neighborhood work. 
 
 Seventh, department for promoting attendance both of members and out- 
 siders at the regular church services. Suppose you had ten men on promoting 
 attendance, and supposing they would take the whole list of mem.bers and 
 each one be responsible for a group of twenty; suppose they attend- all the 
 services themselves, and jot down in a note-book the names of those who are 
 not there; suppose they let these people know they recognize their absence, 
 and miss them. Keep a record of all the strangers. I do not think the preach- 
 ers would object to such a plan. Would it not do the men good? Would it 
 not lead men into the kingdom ? That is the way we go at any other business 
 concern. The church of Christ is the place where men hear the message of life 
 and light. Can we get men into it ? We can if we try. We will try if we are 
 assigned to the task and encouraged to do it. 
 
 Eighth, department for promoting reform. Why should all this Sabbath 
 day work be going on? It could be stopped if the church were to assert its 
 spirit. If the church would unite, many things could be stopped, such as the 
 circulation of bad literature among the school children. Many things we 
 could do if we organize and cooperate. 
 
 Ninth, department for helping the sick and the poor. 
 
 Tenth, department for promoting intellectual development. 
 
 Eleventh, department for work among young men and boys. 
 
 In a department store, an accountant every month looks into the conditions 
 of the various departments, and if any department is not paying, it has to 
 tell the reason why. Why not go at the work of God in such a way and give 
 percentages to indicate progress ? Take the percentage of male members doing 
 aggressive work; the percentage of families having family worship, etc., etc. 
 
 As men's organizations spring up in this denomination, regard every male 
 member as a sharer in the active work of the church. I have five little chil- 
 dren. The two oldest are aged ten and twelve respectively. The boy, ten, was 
 assigned to the department of work for boys. In this department men and 
 boys discuss what to do for the whole commirnity; and although it was the 
 child's custom to go to bed early, still he felt he was a part of the machinery 
 and expected to go. A couple of weeks later there was a meeting of the whole 
 League. After supper he said, "Father, there is a League meeting this even- 
 ing." When we get to the point where the old and young alike share the privi- 
 
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Union Biblical Seminary 
 
 lege of being with God in his work, we are going to have a new dawn Get 
 men to give themselves. Do not talk much about money. When men go to 
 work for the saving of America, they will work for the saving of the world 
 Js there not room for a great advance in our churches in waking up the men 
 into a mighty resistless army of conquest for Jesus Christ? 
 
 Prayer. 
 
 O Lord, we are glad of the share every man and woman may have in thy 
 plan. We thank thee that every one who abides in thee is to bring forth fruit • 
 that no other condition is necessary. Thou dost take the humblest of thy people 
 and let thy light pour through them. Oh, keep us from imagining that just a few 
 ^TFt ^^^ ^^^^ ^^^^^ privilege. May we realize that every one of us is a branch 
 of Christ; that he is counting on us and caiuaot do his work without us. Help 
 us to yield to the flow of his life, that through us it may outpour into the 
 needy world. We pray that thou wilt guide this conference very clearly in think- 
 ing about any steps that we ourselves may take in the better planning of the 
 work which the members of our churches are to do. We certainly need the 
 counsel of the Head of the church at a point like this. It is thy work we are 
 talking about ; thinldng about trying to do ; and thou art the great guide in it, 
 surely. Thou wilt give us wisdom, if we trust thee, and great success if we 
 follow out thy directions. May we be given a divine discrimination as to 
 what principles to employ in enlisting men, especially in the active service of 
 thee. May the day come speedily when men are actively engaged in this 
 work, putting their personality into the work as well as their money. And 
 grant that all our churches may very soon come to the point of counting the 
 kingdom of God the first thing; not putting other things first. To this end may 
 we let thee have right of way in our lives; going out to influence other people. 
 VVe pray we may be more willing to go the whole way with God; that he may 
 lead us and direct us, and grant us thy leadership in any purpose we may 
 agree upon to work toward, and may we go out from this place strengthened 
 mightily. We ask it in thy name. Amen. 
 
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Bible Conference Addresses 
 
 featutDap (Ebeninff. 
 
 GRADUATING EXERCISES OF THE SEMINARY. 
 
 Saturday, Mat 5, 1906, 7:30 p.m. 
 Song by the Arion Quartet. 
 
 Prayer by Rev. J. W. Lilly (who had a son graduate that evening). 
 
 O thou Infinite One, make us conscious, in a measure at least, of our de- 
 pendency as we come into thy presence this evening. We rejoice that we may 
 remember the mercies of the past, and would render thee the offering of our 
 hearts that thou hast brought us safely until this hour. We thank thee for 
 what this gathering represents ; for its influence upon the church. We rejoice 
 and bless thee for this institution of learning; for those that have gone out 
 from its walls into the broad harvest-field to gather sheaves into thine own 
 garner. We thank thee for the success that has attended their efforts. Con- 
 tinue thy blessing upon this institution of learning; upon every member of 
 the faculty and all connected with it. May they more and more seek thy glory 
 and the salvation of men. 
 
 We come especially to thank thee for the class of this evening, whose mem- 
 bers are about to enter upon the greater responsibilities of life. O thou blessed 
 Christ, who opened the Scriptures to the disciples long ago, and their hearts 
 burned within them, we pray that -thou wilt walk with these and open unto 
 them thy word, and, as thou shalt present thy truth, oh, may the Spirit, the 
 Holy Spirit, talk of the things of God. Make them useful in the ministry of 
 tliy word, and may they have influence with those with whom they shall labor. 
 We pray thy blessing upon them. We thank thee for the inspiration that has 
 come to our hearts; for the broader vision we have of our possibilities. Oh, 
 grant that we may have the courage to enter the open doors of usefulness; 
 and may this Church more and more become a power for righteousness, and 
 may we share in the bringing of this lost world to a knowledge of the truth. 
 
 We pray thy blessing upon the speaker of this evening. Grant that the 
 message may be thine own. Prepare our hearts for its reception ; and may we 
 obtain fresh inspiration for the work that may be allotted to each one of us. 
 Guide us in the days that may come to us, and then, at last, oh, at last, bring 
 us to the enjoyment of thyself for thy name's sake. Amen. 
 
 Kev. G. A. Funkhouser introduces to the audience Dr. C. I. B. Brane, 
 whose address was "The Master's Message." 
 
 63 
 
Union Biblical Seminary 
 
 Doctor Brane^s Address. 
 
 llie Master's Messengers. 
 
 I am not sure that I can recall even a brief period in the history of my 
 childhood when I did not at least occasionally experience a desire to become a 
 minister of the gospel ; and the soiirce of my secret sorrow then was the fear that 
 I should not become intellectually qualified, much less morally and spiritually 
 good enough, to occupy that high and responsible position in the church of 
 our blessed Redeemer bought with his own precious blood. Years of expe- 
 rience and observation and hard toil for the Master have simply confirmed 
 those early fears and vindicated the exalted view I then took of what is to me 
 to-day the highest and hardest, but sweetest work to which, in the providence 
 of God, the childi-en of men are called. As is written, "How beautiful upon 
 the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth 
 peace, that bringeth good tidings of good, that publisheth salvation, that saith 
 unto Zion, Thy God reigneth." As the snow-capped summit of the highest 
 mountain lifts itself in strength and beauty above the surrounding hills; as 
 the magnitude of the Pacific Ocean exceeds the capacity of your city reser- 
 voir; as the brightness of the sun under Italy's clearest, bluest sky outshines 
 the faint flicker of the fire-fly, so does the measure and meaning of a goodly 
 personality, especially in the relation of a preacher of righteousness to the 
 community at large, exceed and surpass, in point of intrinsic worth and real 
 helpfulness, every other expression of life which does not embody and exem- 
 plify the power and spirit of the gospel. Moses stood high in his relations 
 with God and men when he lifted the brazen serpent in the center of the 
 camp, and thus furnished physical health and healing to many who were sick 
 and ready to die; but he who, by private or public appeal, especially through 
 the medium of a clean and consecrated life, lifts high the great magnet of the 
 Cross, sustains an infinitely higher and more helpful relation to both. David's 
 three friends who braved the perils of the Philistine camp and brought him a 
 cool drink from the dear old home well, for whose sparkling waters our home- 
 sick hearts sometimes grow desperately thirsty, covered themselves and their 
 king with great honor; but to take the cup of salvation, sparkling with the 
 water of life, and affectionately press it to the lips of lost souls, and thus 
 place them in the line of promotion, not to worldly fame and honor, but to 
 eternal life and glory, is a far greater achievement. Except in the sense of 
 respect for those in authority, it was no honor for Elijah to run ahead of the 
 smoking horses of Ahab's chariot. Indeed, considering who and what the 
 parties were, it would have been more in keeping with the fitness of things for 
 the king to run and the prophet to ride. But to run by the side of the gospel 
 chariot, in which the King of glory rides, no longer mocked and pierced with 
 thorns, thank God, but crowned with victory and honor, and win to a state 
 of saving faith in his personality those who will affectionately strew his path 
 with palms and swell the chorxis of "Hosanna to the son of David," is a rela- 
 tion in life that will count for more, in time and in eternity, than the com- 
 bined achievements of the most deservedly distinguished and useful men and 
 women who have lived and labored exclusively for secular results. 
 
 In the spirit of that persuasion, making the spiritual welfare of men the 
 
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Bible Conference Addresses 
 
 supreme object of life, Jesus placed in the hands of his disciples this com- 
 mission, "Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature." 
 "As ye go, preach." Christian men, women, and children are God's chosen 
 messengers to bear this good news, to tell these glad tidings to every creature. 
 In responding to this call, in executing these orders, in seeking to carry out 
 the wish of the world's Redeemer respecting the publication of the gospel, it 
 is right and reasonable that those who give themselves exclusively to the work 
 should be consciously divinely called. Of course, every Christian is qualified 
 and called upon to contribute something to the restoration of a lost world to 
 the favor and fellowship of God. We are expected to break the Bread of Life 
 to the perishing, both at home and abroad. We are to preach as we go, wher- 
 ever we happen to be, and under all circumstances in life, not merely from the 
 pulpit, but invariably through the media of a holy walk, a God-fearing faith, 
 an affectionate spirit and a passion for souls. Thank God for this individual 
 opportunity, which is universally accorded, to preach the gospel and save 
 souls, which is the greatest, most delightful, and permanently profitable em- 
 ployment upon which the children of men may enter. "He that winneth 
 souls is wise;" and "they that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firma- 
 ment; and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and 
 ever." "Let him know, that he which converteth the sinner from the error of 
 his way shall save a soul from death, and shall hide a miiltitude of sins." 
 What an interesting motive is there set before Christian workers — the destruc- 
 tion of sin and the salvation of souls. 
 
 "Oh, the good we all may do 
 While the days are going by!" 
 
 "Now then we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God did beseech you 
 by us: we pray you in Christ's stead, be ye reconciled to God." That is your 
 mission and mine: we are to offer terms of peace and reconciliation to a lost 
 and rebellious world in the name of Jesus of Nazareth; we are to preach 
 Christ and him crucified; we are to point to the Lamb of God that taketh 
 away the sin of the world; we are to sing the same song that the angels sang 
 when the Master came to the manger. A lost world and a living, loving 
 Savior — that 's our message. How shall we deliver it? May the Holy Spirit 
 lead us all more fully into the great secret of winning souls to Christ. 
 
 Aside from the commonly recognized qualifications for Christian work, 
 which always include moral and intellectual fitness, I wish to emphasize the 
 value of several agencies upon which the results of our labor largely depend. 
 Among those vital forces we fijx the Bible, whose counsel and consolations are 
 so indispensable that we insist upon its truths being studied with even greater 
 exactness than that which characterizes the most diligent student in the pur- 
 suit of secular knowledge. To justify and transmit that conviction I only 
 need to call attention to the contents of this Book. He who opens it with an 
 honest heart, sincerely seeking the welfare of his soul, hungering and thirst- 
 ing after righteousness, enters a land flowing with milk and honey, every- 
 where fruitful and luxuriant, the ripened grain all ready to a full harvest. 
 Even in a literary sense, the Bible is the best book in the world's library. 
 Here we have history, poetry, science, and philosophy, including the redemp- 
 
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Union Biblical Seminary 
 
 tion of the world by the blood of the cross — an expression of divine love over 
 which angels bend in wonder and admiration. Indeed, the Bible is the em- 
 bodiment of intelligence and integrity, the twin powers of reason and right- 
 eousness, just as you have cleverly associated them in the work of the 
 Seminary. 
 
 Historically speaking, the price of this Book is above rubies ! A splendidly 
 connected history of over two thousand of the earliest years of time is faith- 
 fully unfolded in the first few chapters of Genesis. It opens with an account 
 of the creation of the material imiverse, which is followed by facts and figures 
 that will increase in value to the latest generation. Here we have an account 
 of the creation of man, his character and fall, the promise of his redemption, 
 the deluge, the confusion of tongues, "the early settlement of Egypt, the rise 
 and fall of the Assyrian empire, with the names of all of its successive princes ; 
 the origin and overthrow of the Hebrew people, including an account of the 
 ancient cities of Thebes, Nineveh, and Babylon, together with all that ren- 
 dered them the wonders of the world." In connection with these historical 
 facts and figures, the rising tide of interest centers in the beautiful lives of 
 Joseph, Ezra, and Nehemiah, and ciilminates in the thrilling story of the 
 Master's trial and crucifixion, from the time he passed the sop to Judas to the 
 moment when he expired on the cross, which then and there became the key 
 to the kingdom. 
 
 But I do not find the chief value of God's word among its literary treas- 
 ures — its history, its poetry, its masterpieces of eloquent thought and utter- 
 ance. Its supreme worth is found in its moral and spiritual revelations. 
 Here its value is inexpressible in any terms. At this point life and immor- 
 tality are brought to light. The cardinal doctrines are sin and salvation, 
 human ruin and restoration, the former wrought by the disobedience of one 
 man, and the latter accomplished by the obedience of Him who came to seek 
 and save that which was lost. Human selfishness and sin erected the cross, 
 and divine love and mercy accepted that cruel and disgraceful instrument of 
 death as the only means of saving a lost and hopelessly ruined world. No 
 wonder Paul refused to glory in anything by the cross ! It stands for Jesus ! 
 It is the source and center of all spiritual life and power. It is the symbol of 
 law and love, justice and mercy. It is the badge of our discipleship and the 
 sign by which we conquer. Calvary is the loftiest peak in the mountains of 
 divine love — the highest place in the world. Topographically speaking, it 
 rises less than 2,500 feet above the waters of the Mediterranean, but it is the 
 only place in the universe to which the poor sinner may climb and be safe 
 from the rising tide of divine wrath. I know that the poor penitent, bur- 
 dened with a painful sense of sin, is unconscious of his rapidly rising altitude, 
 as he struggles towards the cross-crowned mount, but when he reaches its 
 blood-stained, rock-riven summit, beautiful spires begin to gleam in the sun- 
 light, and within the scope of his inspired vision, when he believes with the 
 heart unto righteousness, rises the beautiful city of God. More than once 
 you and I have stood by the cross and seen, even through tears of disappoint- 
 ment, affliction, and bereavement the blessed light of heaven burst from the 
 gates of pearl, while from over the walls of jasper we caught the joyful notes 
 
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Bible Conference Addresses 
 
 of the happy millions from whose eyes God has wiped away all tears ! Under 
 the shelter of the cross these words attain their deepest, sweetest meaning: 
 
 "Rock of Ages, cleft for me, 
 Let me hide myself in thee; 
 Let the water and the blood, 
 From thy side a healing flood, 
 Be of sin the double cure — 
 Save from wrath and make me pure." 
 
 The poet has faithfully represented the natural hardness of the human 
 heart in these terms : 
 
 "The rocks can rend, the earth can quake. 
 The sea can roar, the mountain shake; 
 Of feeling all things show some sign, 
 But this unfeeling heart of mine." 
 
 The cold rays of hviman reason and philosophy, with the best text in the 
 Bible for a caption, can never reach, much less thaw, a heart like that. Cold 
 arguments of an exclusively intellectual character, no matter how fine or fer- 
 tile their theological tracings may be, are incapable of producing anything in 
 the spiritual world, unless it be a deeper slumber. Nothing but the sentiments 
 and sympathies of the cross can thaw the frozen feelings of an unchanged 
 heart and start the stream of affection in the direction of the Almighty. We 
 must go to Calvary for our spiritual equipment. A lost world and living 
 Savior make up the meaning of our message. 
 
 When Roscoe Conkling was once urging the claims of General Grant for 
 the Presidency, and before he mentioned his name to the great national con- 
 vention, he paused on the high tide of his patriotic appeal and said, "You ask, 
 whence comes our candidate? We answer, from Appomattox!" And imme- 
 diately the great convention hall shook with five thousand shouts of applause. 
 
 The human family is lost in the wilderness of sin and sorrow, and we w^nt 
 some one to lead us out of these deplorable circumstances of distress into 
 divine favor and fellowship, and finally to Father's house on high. You ask, 
 "Whence comes your leader?" We proudly point to Calvary. "Who is this 
 that Cometh from Edon, with dyed garments from Bozrah? This that is 
 glorious in his apparel, traveling in the greatness of his strength? I that 
 speak in righteousness, mighty to save." Jesus is our leader, for he shall 
 save his people from their sins. 
 
 Down the beam of the cross, over the riven rocks of Golgotha, through the 
 streets of Jerusalem, down the valleys of the Hinnom and Kidron, throughout 
 the borders of Palestine, across the waters of the Mediterranean, to every 
 land and age and people and person the saving love of God flows in streams of 
 blood from the pierced hands and feet and heart of Jesus. This is the foun- 
 tain opened in the house of David for sin and uncleanness into which the 
 whole world of mankind may plunge, as Cowper says, and "lose all their 
 guilty stains," 
 
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Union Biblical Seminary 
 
 But we receive from the Bible not only our langriage and literature, our 
 laws and liberties, our moral and religious training, teaching- us exactly how 
 we may be saved from sin and then assist in the salvation of others, but it 
 also furnishes adequate and suitable comfort to Christians under all circum- 
 stances in life. This is a strange world, and while we are in it we shall have, 
 in connection with our spiritual peace and hope, all sorts of bitter experiences, 
 including failure to realize our highest ideals. In Christian life and labor 
 we sometimes find a barren year, when blossoms are untimely driven down by 
 adverse winds; when no ripened fruitage crowns the summer's toil, and the 
 world coldly frowns upon our bruised and breaking hearts, and laughs at our 
 bitter, briny tears. If your experience does not include a barren year, per- 
 haps you encountered a faithless day, that rudely broke the bright promise of 
 the morning, filled the noontide with wreck and disaster, and thus made pain- 
 fully silent the harp of joy you hoped would never be hung on the willow. 
 These things, including poverty, persecvition, affliction, and bereavement, 
 form a part of the "fiery trial" by which we are tested; but these painful 
 problems are either solved or simplified in the light of revelation, and all the 
 bother and bitterness of human experience, at least so far as God's people are 
 concerned, become a mere matter of discipline, working out for them a far 
 more exceeding and eternal weight of glory. 
 
 In connection with a personal knowledge of the saving truths of the Bible, 
 including the spiritual encouragement its pages afford, we need a deeper sym- 
 pathy for lost souls. If we are to "preach as we go," and if our sermons are 
 to be soul-saving expressions of life and spirit, then we must get and keep 
 closer to Jesus. We talk about him a great deal — at least I do — three or four 
 times publicly each week; but may be I do not walk and talk with him as 
 much as I should. I may spend a week in giving logical form and intellectual 
 finish to a sermon, wondering how it will fall on cultivated ears (and the 
 teacher or preacher who ignores the culture of the age is foolish) ; but unless 
 I plead for the ministry of the Spirit in the things of Jesus, my inessage will 
 be a lifeless thing, no matter how pretty or pleasing it may be. The soundest 
 logic and the most exquisite beauty that can characterize a gospel sermon 
 flow from a heart that is tenderly in sympathy with Jesus and lost souls. 
 How rapidly the value of a soul rises in the estimation of a spiritually- 
 minded individual ! How the sight of a lost world taxes the tension of his 
 sympathy, which soon breaks over the narrow limits of his power to give 
 assistance to those who are in need, and sweeps over land and sea to reach 
 and rescue the millions who know not God. It mrkes the brow hot and the 
 heart ache and the soul sad to see the fields white already to harvest, and yet 
 be unable to thrust in a single sickle, simply because the laborers are few. 
 Beyond our crowded centers of population, with their degradation and squalor, 
 rises the dark shadow of heathenism, as wide as the continent and vitterly 
 helpless. As we look into the faces of these permanently cursed millions, and 
 remember that they are our brethren, we should be moved to tears of sympathy 
 over their condition. 
 
 When Isaiah saw the approaching invasion of Judea by Sennacherib and 
 the sorrows that would then befall his people, he said, "Look away from me: 
 I will weep bitterly; labor not to comfort me . . . don't cry to soothe ray 
 
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Bible Conference Addresses 
 
 sorrow in the presence of such a prospect, . . . because of the spoiling of the 
 daughter of my people." There is a sample of solicitude for the welfare of 
 others. If I am not thus deeply concerned for the spiritual prosperity of the 
 people, especially those to whom I minister in the sanctuary services, then I 
 am not a soul-winner, but a self -server, and I have my reward, which is worse 
 than worthless. We must follow Jesus in the spirit of love and consecration 
 through poverty's vale and a toilsome ministry; into the Garden of Agony; 
 through the deceit and revilement of Pilate's hall; up the steeps of Calvary 
 and upon the cross, and from all his sorrows and sufferings infer something 
 as to the value of a single soid. "What is a man profited if he shall gain the 
 whole world and lose his own soul?" He may gain the world, rise to fame 
 and popularity, acquire wealth and scholarship, attain to prominence and 
 power, climb to the very pinnacle of human glory, and yet from that proud 
 eminence confess that his achievements of glory are sources of sorrow and 
 
 disappointment to his soul, for the simple reason 
 ■ that the world can never give the bliss for which 
 we sigh, and especially for the more philosophic 
 reason that the hiiman soul, originally created in 
 the image of God, can never be happy with any- 
 thing less than complete restoration to the bosom 
 of the Father. "I shall be satisfied when I awake 
 with thy likeness." 
 
 Finally, we must be aggressive in our efforts to 
 spread the gospel and save souls; we m.ust go and 
 preach — move up to evei-y opportunity and enter 
 every open door. The promise and power of suc- 
 i m iiiMiniimiM^^^^ cess in winning souls is never found in a merely 
 
 g0^''Jr^^^^^^^^& defensive attitude, no matter how strong the 
 ^ ■ '''• a^^^^^^B church is or how complete its equipment may be. 
 The army that would win victories must get out 
 of the trenches, push the battle in the open field, 
 and even scale the ramparts and plant the flag of 
 God in the very face of the foe. As individuals 
 and churches, we must never be satisfied with hav- 
 ing merely held our own, which is one of the most 
 dangerous and deceitful conceptions that we can possibly have of our religious 
 life and labor. Our spiritual vigor and effectiveness depend upon an aggres- 
 sive response to the moving policy of the gospel, which is born of a passion for 
 souls. That is the only chance we have to weaken the forces of sin and multi- 
 ply the membership of God's conquering hosts. The crowning equipment for 
 this work, so far as the human side is concerned, is a passion for souls. We 
 need men and women in every pew and pulpit — and, by the way, every church, 
 every school, every social circle, every fireside, every professional engagement, 
 every business relation, is an altar at which we may minister in holy things — 
 who appreciate the value of souls and are responsive to the calls and claims of 
 the gospel; who have a deep and tender concern for those who sit in darkness; 
 who are controlled by a sense of personal obligation to break the bread of life 
 to the perishing; who have enough of Christ in their hearts to tenderly sympa- 
 
 REV. C. I. U. HRANE, D. D. 
 
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Union Biblical Seminary 
 
 thize with labor for the lowly and the lost; who practice self-denial in order to 
 save money for the spread of the gospel; who have a consuming ambition to 
 win souls and are frequently found in secret prayer for the coming of Christ's 
 kingdom. 
 
 Our business is to win the world to a better life. To enter successfully 
 upon that mission we must have more love for Christ and a greater solicitude 
 for lost souls. Moreover, out of that spirit comes the sympathy of the soul 
 with the aggressive policy of the gospel, "As ye go, preach." No Christian 
 can consistently refuse obedience to that command, because it comes froin the 
 King himself. It clearly indicates our personal relation to the work of giving 
 the gospel to others, both at home and abroad, and yet we sometimes hesitate 
 in the spirit of unbelief and disobedience, and ask, Am I my brother's 
 keeper? Others say that "God is too good to punish the heathen, or to con- 
 demn us for not sending them the gospel." Why do we hesitate in the pres- 
 ence of such a plain command? Is it love or faith that we lack? We cannot 
 countermand our marching orders by simply citing the mercy of God. Of 
 course there is a fullness in God's mercy like the wideness of the sea, but it 
 can never approve such presumption and willful disobedience on our part, no 
 matter how kindly and completely it may cover the case- of the unlightened 
 heathen. 
 
 "Brightly beams our Father's mercy, 
 From his light-hoixse evermore, 
 But to us he gives the keeping 
 Of the light along the shore." 
 
 Then "Let the lower lights be burning, 
 
 Send a gleam across the wave; 
 Some poor fainting, struggling seaman 
 You may rescue, you may save." 
 
 Brethren, let us take up this commission with the consecration of heart and 
 life, and push the battle and press the foe till every inch of the Master's realm 
 is wrested from the grasp of the invader; till every heathen community, and 
 likewise every degraded section of civilization, is flooded with the light and 
 love of the gospel; till every boss-ridden, graft-afflicted city in the common- 
 wealth is out of the clutches of the boodlers ; till the last saloon-cursed com- 
 munity in the land is delivered from licensed sin, and the kingdoms of this 
 world shall have become the kingdoms of our Lord Jesus Christ. 
 
 The man who is ahead of his time in spiritual thought and feeling, and is 
 aggressive in his plans and purposes to serve God and bless humanity, is 
 sometimes called "a crank" by those who are not summoned by the sympa- 
 thies of the cross; but the fact is, he is called of God to occupy the places of 
 honor and responsibility in the strife of truth with falsehood. Let him rise 
 in his place, far in advance of the slxiggish column of Israel, it may be, and 
 there stand and flame and flash, and proclaim the outreaching, overcoming, 
 soul-saving power of the gospel till every straggler comes bravely up to the 
 banner. Then and there we shall receive a Pentecostal baptism of fire that 
 will consume our indifFerence, quicken our faith, and qualify us for this first 
 charge in the twentieth century, and make it a world-wide victory for Christ. 
 
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Bible Conference Addresses 
 
 Farewell Message by Dr. G. S. Funkhouser to the Class of 1906. 
 
 Now, brethren, class of 1906, I have wondered, after three years of close 
 fellowship in the Seminary, and the teaching I have done, and we have all 
 done in the faculty, I have wondered what could be said in this last moment 
 of your connection with the Seminary that would be profitable. I have won- 
 dered what I would want said to me if I were standing in your place. I was 
 wondering, if this were the last word you were to hear from me, what that last 
 word would be; if you were my sons, what I would want my sons to hear 
 before they went out into the ministry in the world. And I have come to the 
 conclusion that this would be the word: First "preach the word; be instant 
 in season, out of season," the words of Paul. That should be my last counsel 
 I should say to you. In this way you will have, as we have repeatedly said, 
 continued and increased success in your work. I refer you to Chadwick, Mor- 
 gan, and F. B. Meyer as examples of men who have intensely studied the 
 word and preach it. They are thus gaining strength as the years go by. The 
 world is not tired of it, and never will tire of it. 
 
 W. W. White, brother of J. Campbell White, who has been teaching us so 
 ably in this conference, went from New York to Baltimore and taught the 
 word of God to one thousand people. The service was simply introduced by 
 a word of prayer and a very short opening address ; then the doors were closed 
 and nobody could gain entrance into that hall on any account- — could not 
 beg or pay their way in; and yet a thousand people, for ten weeks, went one 
 night a week and paid one dollar to hear this man concerning the word of 
 God. So men will even pay to hear the word of God. 
 
 I should say, Preach the word. In order to preach it, you must study it. 
 Study it devotionally. No one can make much headway otherwise. Read it, 
 study it, first for yourself, then for others; nourish your own heart, and then 
 you will be able to nourish other hearts. By the way, one of the last things 
 Christ said was, "I have given them thy word." He seemed to get great satis- 
 faction in this as he implored the Father, "I have given them thy word." So 
 may you close your ministry, feeling that you have given the people God's 
 word. Keeping close to God's truth and to God through his truth, you will 
 have a low estimate of yourself and your own ability; you will be humble. 
 You will be in sympathy with the word and with God, through his word. 
 
 Some ministers are so unimpressed by even the needs of their people. This 
 will not be true if you study the word of God devotionally, first for yourself 
 and then for others. After the great earthquake, a man said his pastor neither 
 in his prayer nor in his sermon made any reference to the distress caused by 
 the earthquake. His references were four to Jiis text and fifteen to himself, 
 and yet in that pastor's congregation sat persons in great distress because of 
 the loved ones who were in peril. Keep close to God by means of his word. 
 
 Do you notice how close to the ground the dandelions bloom sometimes? 
 Last Saturday evening our yard was full of dandelions, and we went to work 
 and out off every little yellow head that showed itself, lest it should go to seed 
 on the following day and send seeds out to our neighbor's yards. But there was 
 a refreshing shower on Saturday night, and on Sunday morning 1 looked out 
 and saw our yard was just as yellow as it was the evening before. And these 
 
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Union Biblical Seminary 
 
 dandelions seemed to say, "If you will not let me bloom on a high stalk, I will 
 bloom nearer the ground." They were just as yellow as the ones we had cut off. 
 So you may do in your life. If you may not occupy the high places, you may 
 be beautiful in a lower place. Study the word ; preach the word. 
 
 We bid you, as a faculty. Godspeed in the great work to which He has 
 appointed you, believing that you will not only have success, but abundant 
 success. May God bless you. 
 
 Prayer by Bishop T. C. Carter. 
 
 Almighty God, our Heavenly Father, we thank thee that thou hast a mes- 
 sage to bring to this lost world, and that thou hast the messengers to bear 
 thy truth to those who are in sin and in darkness and in the shadow of death. 
 We thank thee thou dost count these worthy to put them into the ministry, 
 calling them to become colaborers with thyself to help save the lost world. 
 We pray thy blessing upon each of them as they take upon themselves this 
 hour the more solemn vows of the ministry connected with their ordination. 
 We pray, O Lord, they may go out this hour with divine chivalry to save the 
 world; go as the crusaders of the Lord, to place thy banners on the high places 
 and to help bring light to those who are in darkness. O Lord, we pray for a 
 baptism of power to come upon them at this moment, that they may be humble 
 and faithful and true in all their ministerial life ; that they may bear in their 
 own personality that which shall draw men from sin and charm them to the 
 Savior of the world. 
 
 Bless this institution in which they have been trained, the president, his 
 associate faculty, the trustees, the patrons, and all who are engaged in the 
 building up of the work. Bless the entire Church; give it power and influ- 
 ence, we pray thee, this year in revival service, an influence that has ever 
 been possible in connection with this denomination. Receive us at last in the 
 eternal life with Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. 
 
 Closing Prayer by Bishop G. M. Mathews. 
 
 God, our gracious Father, thou art lifting upon iis the light oi thy coun- 
 tenance. Thou art wonderfully interested in this beautiful scene of so many 
 young men coming, at the close of their Seminary course, with the rich expe- 
 riences enjoyed these years, and reaching the highest point, to consecrate 
 themselves anew and fully to thee in thy work. Lord, our Savior, thou hast 
 not only called them into thy kingdom, but into special service to proclaim 
 the everlasting riches of the gospel of ,Tesus Christ to dying men. Thou art 
 always profoundly interested in young life. Thou dost look down upon these 
 young men with peculiar interest; and, as thou dost look forward preparing 
 the way for them, some in the home land and some in the foreig-n, wilt thou 
 open upon them thy life and power and blessed sympathy. O God, at this 
 moment may the Holy Spirit descend upon them as the Spirit descended upon 
 
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Bible Conference Addresses 
 
 Jesus in the form of a dove, and give them great tenderness as they put their 
 hearts to the task that is upon them. Thou art more than ever laying upon 
 them the burden as well as giving them the privilege of preaching the gospel 
 of Jesus Christ to dying men. May this be an hour that shall be remembered 
 all their lives, because of the special preparation that shall come to their 
 hearts and minds in this consecration. Bless their families, their mothers, 
 brothers, sisters, some of whom are in other cities and praying for them at 
 this time. O thou blessed Spirit, wilt thou hear the prayers of mothers, 
 fathers, and loved ones for this sacred and joyous hour? Some in foreign 
 fields and some in the home land are to go, and may thou open the way that 
 they may achieve great spiritual victory. We ask it all in His precious name. 
 Amen. 
 
 Benediction by Dr. C. I. B. Brane. 
 
 63 
 
Union Bihlical Seminary 
 
 §)unliap Scorning;. 
 
 Bishop Bell's Prayer. 
 
 God of all grace, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Creator of the universe, 
 thou hast appointed to each of us our place for service. Thou hast appointed 
 to us our day of privilege and power. We are all in subordination to thee. 
 Thou hast accorded to us the gleaming harvest fields and the glad privilege of 
 doing what we may in the midst of all this stimulating opportunity with 
 which we are environed. We offer in thy sight, this morning, glad thanksgiving 
 and praise. We delight in thy character. Our hearts would praise thee be- 
 cause thou art who thou art, and because from thy throne of infinite power, 
 love, and justice thoii dost rule in the affairs of men. Whatever may be 
 beyond our world, in the universe of which we are a part, we may not know; 
 but we thank thee that upon our world has been flashed the compassion of the 
 Infinite Father. We thank thee that light has been shed from the upper world, 
 even from heaven above. We adore thee for all the sweet mystery of the incar- 
 nation, and for the redemption that is in Christ Jesus the Lord. We praise 
 thee that he has been exalted before the faith of the race in all the ages as the 
 center of the 'world's hope, the source of its life and power, the guaranty of 
 restored manhood, a redeemed race in a blissful immortality. 
 
 We would not fail of glad thanlisgiving for the more than one hundred 
 years of significant history that has characterized our own denominational 
 life. We thank thee that thou hast fostered through all these years the 
 organic life of our body, as we also thank thee for thy care and blessing over 
 all Christendom. We thanl? thee for thy heart of love that pulses in the love 
 of Christian men all around the world to-day. We rejoice in the honor that 
 brings us into copartnership with thyself in all the good work of the age in 
 which we live. 
 
 We remember our relationship to the great Republic of which we are a part. 
 We recall with profound thanksgiving thy providence in our national life. 
 We are American citizens, and as those who rejoice in their inheritance we 
 invoke thy blessing upon our Republic to-day. Recently there has come to a 
 part of our country a great calamity, that has brought sorrow and death and 
 privation to thousands of homes. We thanlv thee that no sooner was the cal- 
 amity known, and even before the work of destruction was complete, than it 
 was graciously mitigated by the outflow of hiiman kindness, affection, and 
 relief, from the four comers of the earth. We thank thee that in such an hour 
 there came the outburst of human brotherhood, the rapid riishing of relief 
 trains, the concentration of nurses and physicians. We thank thoe that our 
 civilization is perva:ded so largely by these generous impulses of brotherhood, 
 and by these strong ties of common kinship. We pray thy blessing upon suf- 
 
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Bible Conference Addresses 
 
 •fering California to-day. Grant to bind up broken hearts, to restore smitten 
 institutions, and to steady the faith of tried hearts. May there come out of 
 this disaster cities more beautiful and pure, institutions more Christian and 
 humane, business fenteriDrises more stable and helpful. 
 
 We thank thee for the testimony of our President to righteovisness. We in- 
 voke thy blessing upon him to-day as our chief magistrate. We pray that he 
 shall be guided, controlled, sustained, directed in all righteousness, and for the 
 execution of thy highest will in our national life. We pray thee that justice 
 and righteousness shall be begotten in the conscience, habits, and customs of 
 our people as never before. 
 
 We are reminded that we worship to-day in the great commonwealth of 
 Ohio. We thank thee for the Christian statesmanship that has been exempli- 
 fied in the governor of this State. We thank thee for the definite and potent 
 influence which he is exerting in behalf of the enforcement of law, and the 
 promotion of sobriety and peace. We pray thy blessing upon him to-day. 
 Though now afflicted, may it please thee, O God, to restore him to health and 
 strength. May he be spared to minister for righteousness in the days that are 
 to come. 
 
 We thank thee that we feel a kinship in our hearts with every organization 
 of Christian men and women in the world to-day. We invoke thy Spirit and 
 grace upon the chiirch universal. May the divine life abound in the souls of 
 men, until all nations shall be lifted up unto thee. 
 
 In the midst of these significant environments, on this special occasion, we 
 would come with glad homage and praise for thy loving-kindness. We thanlv 
 thee for an hour of such thrilling interest, that brings together this representa- 
 tive gathering of our churches with the graduates of the Seminary, our insti- 
 tution of sacred learning. We thank thee for this annual occasion, which 
 brings to these students the completion of their course of special training, 
 which brings them to the moment of farewell to faculty and fellow-students, 
 which projects them into a life of privilege and peril in our great nation and 
 the regions beyond. Such a moment bids us readjust ourselves to our own most 
 sacred vows, to our faith and our supremest love to thee. We pray thy bless- 
 ing, therefore, first of all, upon these young men, who go forth from this insti- 
 tution in the class of this year, to do thy work in the world. May it please 
 thee. Almighty God, to grant them this morning, in the overwhelming sacred- 
 ness of thishour, the anointing of the Holy Ghost. May it be that upon them ' 
 shall come just now thy Spirit in gracious measure. Inasmuch as we influence 
 others by what we are more than by what we say, we pray that the Spirit of 
 God shall work in these young men the miracle of spiritual transformation, 
 the imparting of Christ's likeness. May they each come to the realization of 
 such heart affinity with God as shall make them influential under the training 
 which they have received in preaching the gospel of Christ throughout the 
 earth. We would implore thy abundant blessing upon the Seminary, upon its 
 faculty, upon all who are associated with it, its general manager, and those 
 who solicit for it. Grant to give wisdom and strength, life, light, and power. 
 We pray that more and more there shall come into the hearts of our people a 
 prayerful passion for the calling and training of ministers and missionaries, 
 who shall go out from us as the heralds of Christ. 
 
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Union Biblical Seminary 
 
 Grant thy blessing upon our Printing Establishment — upon its manager, 
 its employees, its products, to the end that in its great work it may exert a 
 holy influence for the healing of the nations. May it please thee to grant thy 
 immediate presence in this service, and that thy servant who shall speak to us 
 may be thy mouthpiece for this occasion. May the message that he shall bring 
 be satisfying, illuminating, and permeated throughout by the Holy Spirit. 
 And now grant to take charge of us in all "our relationships. Keep us safely 
 and steadily in obedience to thy sovereign will as long as we may live and 
 toil for thee. Prepare us for the splendid blessedness of the life which is to 
 come, and grant that we may daily grow in the power and communion of our 
 Lord. Help us to publish and bear witness to his power to save a sinning 
 race and grant that thy divine love shall inflame our hearts everywhere as a 
 denomination, and lead us to choose and accomplish the best things for thy 
 kingdom on earth. Give thy blessing to this goodly city in which we are 
 assembled, and to all whom we should remember at this moment of our suppli- 
 cation. Call us to thyself in fellowship and communion for all the days of our 
 earthly pilgrimage. May our lives be fruitful, patient, and courageous. Bring 
 us ultimately through thy benediction to thy presence and glory, and to the 
 rewards of the life everlasting permit us all to come gladly, joyously, and 
 triumphantly, in Jesus' name. Amen. 
 
 Address of J. Campbell White. 
 
 ^'Onr Personal Relation to the World's Redemption.'' 
 
 I could not get the consent of my mind to speak on any other theme this 
 morning than our personal relation to the world's redemption. Martin Luther 
 said at one time, "If any one would knock on the door of my breast and ask, 
 'Who lives here?' I would not reply, 'Martin Luther,' but would say, 'The 
 Lord Jesus Christ.' " It was an entirely Scriptural idea of his life. Many 
 centuries before, the great Apostle Paul said, "I am crucified with Christ: 
 nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me." 
 
 The most inspiring thotight that ever takes possession of any human soul 
 is that our mission in this world is a part of the mission of Jesus Christ; 
 that the work which he began to do while here, he is now continuing 
 to do through us as his ambassadors. Did he not say, "As long as I am in the 
 world, I am the light of the world ?" Yet before he went away he said, "Ye 
 are the light of the world" ; and on the evening of the resurrection he said to 
 his disciples, "As my Father hath sent me into the world, even so send I you." 
 According to our Master's thought, your mission and mine is to be merely 
 the continuation and completion of his own divine work ; and while it will 
 forever remain triie that Christ alone can save this world, it is equally true 
 that according to his own divine plan Christ cannot save this world alone. He 
 counts on your help and mine as absolutely essential to the carrying out of 
 his plan; and only so far as we willingly cooperate with him is it possible for 
 him to save this world. This is the only explanation of the fact that all the 
 centuries have gone by since he gave his commission, and that still a large 
 
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Bible Conference Addresses 
 
 proportion of the world does not know him. People professing to know him 
 have been so much absorbed with their own affairs that they have not sought 
 first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and the only reason to-day 
 why Christianity does not possess the world is because Christ does not possess 
 Christians. ' His plan for the redemption of the world was made unmis- 
 takably clear in three sentences that are recorded in the thirteenth chap- 
 ter of Matthew, where he said, "He that soweth the good seed is the Son 
 of man; the field is the world; the good seed are the children of the kingdom" 
 — ourselves. When he said the field is the world, he included America, he in- 
 cluded Europe, and Africa, and Asia, and all the rest of the earth. There is 
 to him no home field and no foreign field. E\'ery man everywhere needs* 
 Christ, and no man anywhere can be saved apart from him; and the supreme 
 work of every man everywhere who knows him is to make him known to every 
 other man everywhere. And only so far as Ave are entering into this spirit 
 and doing this thing are we reincarnating the spirit of Christ and carrying 
 out his divine purpose for our lives. Only so far as we are doing this thing 
 are we living a life that will satisfy either him or us when we meet him face 
 to face. 
 
 I remember very well when I was a boy working on ray father's farm, 
 having illustrated to me one time the different results that might follow from 
 the right and wrong planting of seed. Some of you probably have worked on 
 farms, and know something about seed-time in the spring, when the boys go 
 out to plant corn. We planted it in the old-fashioned way twenty-five years 
 ago, one of the small boys going along with a pail full of corn and dropping 
 three or four kernels in a hill, and some larger person coming behind and 
 covering it up with the hoe. When along in the middle of a gravelly field 
 where I was dropping corn I made some kiud of a misstep and stumbled and 
 spilled about a double-handful of it. The grains went bounding off among the 
 clods and sand in a way that was rather disconcerting to a boy of nine or ten 
 years. I stood there for a moment or so, arguing with myself whether I 
 should go to the trouble of picking it up, or simply make short work of it by 
 covering it up. I don't know what you would have done under similar cir- 
 cumstances, but I covered it up [laughter], not seeming to thinlc that this 
 would come up just like the rest. But in two or three weeks, when we came 
 along to cultivate the corn, this had come up just as high as that which had 
 been deliberately planted; but it had all been thrown in there in a heap, and 
 the stalks were standing so close together that they scarcely had room. It 
 could never possibly grow to maturity in that kind of way, and there was all 
 the corn planted in the hills that could ever grow on that amount of space, 
 and anyhow the cultivator had to go along between those rows, so this 
 couldn't be allowed to remain there. I remember thinking what a waste it 
 was, as it all had to be pulled up and thrown away. That amount of corn 
 planted out in some unoccupied part of the field would have produced seed- 
 corn enough to have planted the whole farm the next year, and planted again, 
 would have had seed enough to have planted the whole of Wayne County the 
 next year, and by the next year we might have planted the whole State of Ohio 
 with corn. But, planted where it was, it was absolutely useless. 
 
 It depends tremendously upon whei'e a life is planted how much the harvest 
 
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Union Biblical Seminary 
 
 is going to be! The sons of the kingdom are the seed of the kingdom, and 
 must be planted all over the world-field if we are going to have a world-wide 
 harvest for God. It would be just as rational for the farmers of this 
 county to sit quietly in their houses this spring and pray for a big crop of 
 corn next fall without ever turning a furrow or planting a seed, as it is for 
 the church of Christ to pray, "Thy kingdom come," and sit down and do 
 nothing and expect it to come. 
 
 There is another parable in this same book of Matthew that speaks of the 
 good seed being the Word of God. It is true that this is the seed which must 
 be planted in the hearts of men everywhere before any spiritual harvest can 
 Spring up in their lives. But before this seed-sowing becomes possible this 
 other seed-sowing must take place by the ministers of Jesus Christ being sent 
 everywhere throughout the world-wide field, and that seed-sowing has not yet 
 taken place; and we dare not pray for a world-wide harvest until it does. 
 The point at which to direct our prayers is the point still which our Master 
 indicated when he said, "The harvest truly is great, but the labourers are few : 
 pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he would send forth labourers 
 into his harvest;" and when that prayer is answered, we may then well ask 
 that God will so empower those messengers of his, and so speak through them 
 his mighty truth, that it may find lodgment in the hearts of those who hear, 
 and that all the world may turn away from its bondage and degradation of 
 sin into the glorious light and liberty of the sons of God. 
 
 But the seed-sowing must come before the harvest. It is true that there is 
 vast need in America; one fourth only of the people in this Christian land of 
 purs are Christians really in the sense of being members of the Protestant 
 Christian church. To every one of us who to-day is rejoicing in fellowship 
 with Christ there are three people somewhere in America who are outside of 
 the kingdom. There is a vast work for the church to do. Every denomination 
 in our country has a home missionary field equal to three times its own mem- 
 bership. If each denomination takes merely its own average, our little United 
 Presbyterian Chiarch, with one hundred and twenty-five thousand members, has 
 a home mission field of about three hundred and seventy-five thousand people 
 to reach ; and we are going to plan more definitely than ever before actually to 
 reach them and give them a chance to be saved. Your United Brethren 
 Church, with a quarter of a million members, would have three-quarters of a 
 million of a home missionary field; and I hope as the years go on you will 
 reach out in larger and more aggressive activity, reaching them by the twenty- 
 five or forty or fifty thousand a year, until you win that whole three-qviarters 
 of a million to Jesus Christ. There is no possible excuse for- our not doing 
 this thing. Is there any exciise for any man or woman of us who knows 
 Christ not trying to introduce him to some of our friends who do not know 
 him, every year? and would it be a very great thing if in a single year each of 
 us were to introduce Christ to three of our brother-men ? If all the churches 
 of America woiild do that, we might evangelize this nation from one ocean to 
 the other in twelve months. And why is it impossible for iis to save 
 America? There is no impossibility about it unless it is impossible for us to 
 obey our Lord. (Voices, "Aiuen.") It will not depend entirely upon so-called 
 home missionary agencies, although they are absolutely vital to the complete 
 
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Bible Conference Addresses 
 
 success of the enterprise. All of the bishops who are here to-day might speak 
 each in turn about destitute fields in the part of the country from which they 
 come, where they do not have adequate religious opporttinities ; and we must 
 go on extending all these aggressive home missionary and educational agencies 
 in order to raise up a number of trained leaders for the aggressive work of 
 the church at home and abroad, and for the occupation of unoccupied parts 
 of our land. But the great bulk of all the work that any church can do in 
 America for its redemption must be done by you and me in our own com- 
 munities; and the probability is that at least three- fourths of all the work 
 could be done in America without any added expense at all if you and I and 
 other members of the church of Christ were to do what we can in the com- 
 munities where we live. Probably the other twenty-five per cent, of the un- 
 occupied field will have to be occupied by our sending out, through our gifts 
 and our representatives, the gospel to the destitute parts of this land. Are we 
 not willing to do it? Are we patriots at all? How much are we doing in dol- 
 lars and cents for the redemption of America? This denomination is doing, 
 I am told, considerably less than an average of two cents a week for the re- 
 demption of America. Is that our best ? A postage stamp a week — something 
 less than that — for the redemption of America. 
 
 But America isn't the only field. The fact is that all the rest of the world 
 depends on Christian America more than on any other land for its light, and 
 we need to realize that we are not merely a world-power in the sense of a 
 political power, but preeminently a world-power as a representative of Jesus 
 Christ for the spiritual redemption of the world; and the denominations and 
 individuals who fail to recognize that are simply narrowing the sphere in 
 which God meant them, to live, and can never by any possibility liave the in- 
 fluence or become the men and women that God means them to become; for 
 the only way we can ever be all that God wants us to be is to imdertake to do 
 that which he wants us to do. It is by doing in the fear and in the strength 
 of God that men become what he meant them to become. 
 
 As we look out over the rest of the world, even after all these centuries of 
 Christian activity, we find that two-thirds of the human race are in non- 
 Christian lands. Of the fifteen hundred millions of people living in the 
 world to-day, a thousand millions of them are in lands where Christ is not 
 known except as he is known through the representatives of the Christian 
 churches. How largely has the whole Christian church entered into this field 
 and attempted to occupy and evangelize it? There are in all the world to-day 
 something less than fifteen thousand representatives of all Protestant mis- 
 sionary countries and churches. In order that there might be one missionary 
 among every twenty-five thoiisand heathens, there would need to be forty 
 thousand such workers in all the world. What does that mean? It means 
 that there are twenty-five thousand districts to-day in non-Christian lands, 
 every one of them containing twenty-five thousand individuals, without any 
 worker at all among them. Think of that for a moment! TVenty-five thou- 
 sand districts, every one of them containing twenty-five thousand people, 
 without a worker, without a representative of Jesus Christ! Is tliat the best 
 we can do ? And what is the moral and spiritual condition of these myriads ? 
 I have brought with me two or three symbols of non-Christian religions which 
 
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Union Biblical 8eminq/ry 
 
 I would like to show you. I think people very often learn more through such 
 means than through words. I have a picture here that I got at Calcutta, a 
 picture not made by missionaries, but a picture made by Hindoos to represent 
 their own religion. The main feature of it is a cow. The Hindoos worship 
 the cow as the most sacred thing in the world. There is only one other idea 
 so generally prevalent as that in their system of religion : that is the absolute 
 degradation of all women. Imagine two lies like that upon which is built the 
 religious faith of more than two hundred millions of people — the sacredness of 
 the cow and the degradation of women. Those figiires in the attitude of wor- 
 ship in front of the cow represent Hindoos. The man with his hands before 
 his face is in the attitude that all Hindoos take when they worship their gods. 
 The woman also represents India worshiping through flowers, fruit, and in- 
 cense, this sacred animal. Around over the picture are forty or fifty of 
 the gods that the Hindoos worship; but these are only a few samples of the 
 three hundred and thirty millions of gods that they profess to worship. There 
 are over three hundred millions of people, and there are thirty raillions more 
 of gods than individuals. A man might have a different god every day of his 
 life, and live one thousand years, and only worship a few of them ; and among 
 all these gods there wasn't one that lived a decent life. Among the most popu- 
 lar was the god Krishna, who lived so immoral a life, according to the state- 
 ment in their books, that it is impossible to translate it into the English lan- 
 guage. If anybody did it they would be prosecuted for publishing obscene 
 literature. You will notice the serpent on the tail of the cow, because many 
 Hindoos worship snakes. The whole picture represents the husks and ashes 
 upon which more than two hundred millions of our fellow-men are trying to 
 feed their hungry hearts to-day. 
 
 I saw a Hindoo' go past my door. He had held his right hand clenched in 
 that way [clenches fist] until the nails as they grew pierced the flesh, finally 
 penetrated clear through the back of his hand, and then, as they grew longer 
 and longer, turned clear up around his knuckles again, longer than any bird's 
 claws you ever saw, tying his hand into a hideous, useless knot for the rest of 
 his life. Oh, my brother men, if you knew the untold suffering of heathen 
 lands to-day inflicted voluntarily for the sake of finding something to satisfy 
 heart hunger, it would break your heart, and you would feel that the only 
 thing to live for the rest of your life, if you have any element of humanity in 
 you, to say nothing of any element of divinity, is to give your utmost efforts 
 to the relieving of the sufferings that must always accompany a degraded form 
 of worship. 
 
 I have with me here also a symbol of Buddhism, a machine by which the 
 people say their prayers. Underlying all non-Christian religions is the idea 
 that prayer is merely a method of work, and they don't consider it communion 
 with God at all. It is a way of attaining merit by doing a whole lot of work, 
 and so the Mohammedan counts off his prayers five times a day, and the 
 Hindoo counts the beads to see how many times he has repeated the names of 
 one of these hideous gods, and the Buddhist has gone so far as to make a 
 machine on which he can say his prayers more easily and rapidly. Here is 
 one of the machines, and it shows how the Buddhist prays. There is a piece 
 of paper on which one prayer has been printed over and over a number of 
 
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Bihle Conference Addresses 
 
 times. The idea is that every revolution of this wheel is a repetition of all 
 the prayers printed on the inside; and when I first saw this wheel it was in 
 the hands of a Buddhist priest who was walking along revolving it in this 
 fashion, while he smoked his pipe, and looked around over a very beautiful 
 landscape, and talked to his friends, and went on saying his prayers as a sort 
 of side issue. They carry the idea to yet further absurdity all over Thibet by 
 making those wheels on a larger scale, often as large as a barrel, and filling 
 them up with yards and yards of this same printed nonsense ; and then, to save 
 anybody the trouble of turning it, they locate it along the side of some moun- 
 tain stream and rig it up to a water-wheel that keeps it going around day 
 after day without any effort on the part of anybody. I suppose that might be 
 described as prayer by the barrel and prayer by water-power. But we all 
 understand perfectly well that there is no prayer about it at all, and among all 
 the sad things in the world to-day, and there are some that are very sad — I 
 suppose Bishop Bell could tell us about some very sad things out in San 
 Francisco,— but of all the sad things in the world to-day, I don't know of any- 
 thing quite so sad as this, that two people out of every three in all the world, 
 every one of them needing God as much as I do, do not know how to find him. 
 I am perfectly sure that my little four-year-old baby girl, who kneels down 
 each day by her mother's knee and speaks to God, has a far better idea of what 
 prayer is in its essence than the old gray-headed grandfathers and grand- 
 mothers all over India and China and Africa, who do not even know how to 
 pray. Isn't it a very strange thing that when you and I do know how, and 
 know that we have a God who can hear and who can do, and who has told us 
 that the solution of this whole problem depends on prayer — isn't it a very 
 strange thing that ever we allow twenty-four hours to go by without from our 
 hearts looking up into his face and saying, "Lord, thy kingdom come, thy will 
 be done in all the world even as it is done in heaven," and then living as we 
 pray? 
 
 I have here a symbol of paganism. Our newest mission station is away up 
 in the heart of Africa. I was up there visiting o\ir mission work, and brought 
 back a complete lady's outfit [holding up a piece of cloth], from our mission 
 station at Khartoum. We need not very long look at a woman's attire of 
 that sort without getting a little picture of the moral and physical and 
 spiritual condition prevailing among tens of millions of our brothers and 
 sisters, and of the brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ whom he cared enough 
 for to lay down his life that they might enter into likeness to his. If your 
 mother, or your sister, or your wife, or your daughter were somewhere in the 
 world, doomed to that kind of life, to that kind of dress, how much would you 
 be able to do to rescue one whom you loved? Our Lord says witJi reference 
 to every one of these poor women and the more degraded men who live around 
 them, "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, 
 ye have done it unto me." Can we not do for him as much as we would do for 
 a loved human friend? 
 
 I have here also a symbol of Mohammedanism, one of the great non-Chris- 
 tian religions of the world. It is a Mohammedan slave-driver's whip, which 
 1 brought with me also from Khartoum, where the slave traffic has grown 
 and prospered for two hundred and fifty years. It was brought from 
 
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Union Biblical Seminary 
 
 the center of that traffic, I have used it as a symbol of Mohammedanism be- 
 cause that religion believes in slavery. The Koran, the Mohammedan sacred 
 book, authorizes every Mohammedan man to have four wives, and change 
 them as often as he likes, and in addition to that to have an unlimited 
 number of female slaves; and to satisfy this outrageous lust inhuman men 
 have been sent off into those parts of the world where slave-trading was tol- 
 erated, to burn and kill and ravish and capture; and when David Livingstone 
 and "Chinese" Gordon went to the heart of Africa, to lay down their 
 lives if necessary, they estimated that not less than five hundred thou- 
 sand slaves were being carried out of the country each year, and about 
 three times that number being butchered in connection with slavery, a total 
 of about two millions a year either enslaved or slaughtered. I suppose no 
 other equal portion of the earth's surface has been so literally soaked in human 
 blood as all that part of Africa. The spirit of Mohammedanism v/as brought 
 out a few years ago when a man at the head of the Mohammedan church, 
 the Khalifa, captured a man one day whom he thought had some money; 
 and in order to get him to tell where his money was hidden, that he might 
 steal it, he ordered him to have a thousand strokes with a whip like that, on 
 his bare back of course, every stroke raising blisters, if it didn't actually cut 
 the flesh. As the man refused to tell, he had a thousand strokes more on the 
 second day, and on the third day another thousand more, imtil he \\'as literally 
 beaten almost to pieces. One would suppose that even Mohammedan bmtality 
 would have exhausted itself by measures like that, b\it as the man still dog- 
 gedly refused to say where his money was hidden, preferring, if necessary, to 
 give up life, the Khalifa ordered that his wounds be poiired full of a strong 
 solution of salt water and Sudan pepper water, that through this manner of 
 treatment he might be led to reveal the place of the treasure. A soldier who 
 had been captured and kept there as a slave for more than ten years, seeing 
 the outrageous treatment to which this man was being subjected, came to the 
 Khalifa and begged the privilege of waiting on him in his agony. The Khalifa 
 said, "On one condition I will grant you the privilege." What do you 
 suppose the condition was? It was the greatest humiliation to which one 
 man is capable of subjecting another. He said, "If you will prostrate yo^^r- 
 self on your face at my feet, asking this request, I will grant it." Would you 
 have done it? Enough of the spirit of our Master had come into the heart of 
 this man to lead him instantly to prostrate himself on his face at the feet of 
 this monster, that he might gain the privilege of waiting upon his black bar- 
 barian brother for the few closing hours of his life. It wasn't many hours 
 that he needed to be waited upon, for the man very soon died, never revealing 
 the place of his treasure. 
 
 We have in that authentic incident not only the awful merciless sav- 
 agery of the Mohammedan religion, but the spirit of brotherhood and the 
 willingness to sacrifice in order to serve that was the command to the fol- 
 lowers of Jesus Christ, of every land and every age, to make them willing 
 to press over land and sea and desert and mountain, even to the remotest 
 corners of the world, that they might everywhere proclaim the power of Jesus 
 Christ to save to the uttennost all that would come unto him by faith. 
 
 Do we realize that two-thirds of the world is in the grip of Mohammedan- 
 
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Bible Conference Addresses 
 
 ism and Hindooism and Buddhism and paganism to-day, and all that Christ 
 can do to release these thousands of millions of our brother men from this 
 awful grip he is trying to do through you and me? How much is he able to 
 do through you ? How many people have you ever prayed out into these fields ? 
 How many people would your offerings have sent? How long would it have 
 supported them'? Have yovi ever given a child, or been willing to give a child, 
 that God through him might proclaim his truth in some dark part of the 
 earth? Are you willing to go yourself if God wants you to go? I hope that 
 no one of these young men who go out to-day into the leadership of this Church 
 is unwilling to go anywhere in this world where God may send him. I 
 can't imagine that any men, from the bishops down to the doorkeepers in our 
 churches, can ever be of the use that God wants to make of them in this world, 
 unless they are so surrendered to the will of Jesus Christ that they are willing 
 to go to Africa or anywhere else in this world that our Lord wants to send 
 them; and when we all have that kind of surrender to Jesus Christ we are 
 going to put our prayers and our children and our possessions and ourselves on 
 the altar of God, and ask him to use us up to the very last limit that he can 
 use us in hastening that day when all tlie world shall be set free. Are you 
 willing that he should use your life? Do you remember how Jesus Christ 
 identified himself with his chiirch as was revealed when he said to Paul, 
 "Paul, Paul, why persecutest thou me?" It was the church Paul persecuted, 
 and he didn't suppose he was persecuting the Lord God at all, biit he was ; and 
 that is the way Christ has identified himself with us. How have we identified 
 ourselves with him? Do the world's needs bear on our hearts to-day as they 
 do on his? That is the kind of identification he must have with us, by our 
 own voluntary choice, before this world can be changed into the garden of the 
 Lord. "As my Father hath sent me into the world, even so send I you ;" and 
 as we approach our Lord we share his compassion and his purposes and his 
 sacrifice to save the world. Do you know how rapidly these people are going 
 beyond our rfeach ? "When I left -India three years ago I was so moved with 
 pity and sorrow for those people, and never wanted them to go out of my mind 
 for a day or an hour, that I figaired up the death rate in the land, to which I 
 had given ten years of my life; and imder the second-hand of my watch I 
 wrote out the rate at which they are passing out into the world beyond with- 
 out Christ, and without any hope, they will tell you themselves; and I had to 
 put an ink-mark alongside of every third second on my watch, and that was 
 for India alone; and if you add in Africa, and China, and South America, and 
 the rest of the non-Christian world, you have got to put an ink-mark right 
 alongside of every second to represent the death rate that goes on day and 
 night, month after month, until we reach them and change them. Will you 
 realize with me for a few seconds what that means, and think what it would 
 mean if they were your brothers and sisters and friends who were going away 
 in that way without Christ [holding watch in hand] ? Every count represents 
 a death somewhere in the non-Christian world, this hour and every hour. One, 
 two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, four- 
 teen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty- 
 two, twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty- 
 eight, twenty-nine, thirty — in thirty seconds, and my watch goes on and the 
 
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Union Biblical Seminary 
 
 death rate goes on, minute after minute, hour after hour, year after year. At 
 the end of this hour that we worship together, thirty-six hundred people have 
 gone — twice as many as there are here this morning. At the end of this beauti- 
 ful Sabbath day in which we are rejoicing in God, eighty-six thousand people 
 will have gone. There are a little less than that in the city of Dayton to-day 
 (census of 1900) ; every day of the year a Dayton being wiped out in the non- 
 Christian world. Will you remember that? Will you pray that it may be 
 changed? Will you live that it may be changed? 
 
 "Give me thy heart, O Christ, thy love untold. 
 That I like thee may pity, like thee may preach; 
 For round me spreads on every side a waste 
 Drearer than that which moved thy soul to sadness ; 
 No ray hath pierced this immemorial gloom, ^ 
 
 And scarce these darkened, toiling myriads taste 
 Even a few drops of fleeting earthly gladness 
 As they move on slow, silent, to the tomb." 
 
 What does it mean to them? What does it mean to Christ? What does it 
 mean to you ? 
 
 I know that averages sometimes are misleading, but I think we need to face 
 fairly what our churches are doing to meet this need, and as I have studied 
 your Year-Book and consulted with your officials since I came here, they tell 
 me that for every dollar that is spent to win heathen people, trying to reach 
 those throngs of darkness, thirty-five dollars .are spent in America to help 
 provide the gospel to you people who already have had it and to reach the 
 other three-fourths of humanity in this country who need that, of course, as 
 much as any one else; but to reach exactly the same size of field, measured 
 there and measured here, thirty-five dollars were spent here and one spent 
 there ; and this last year the average per member of the Church seems to figure 
 up to only about twenty cents for the whole year, and that would be two-fifths 
 of a cent a week to save the world. If everybody gave something every week, 
 the smallest amount that could be given would be a penny a week, and that 
 would be $135,000 in a year as against $50,000 that was given last year — a 
 street-car fare once every three months. Is that the best we can do — people 
 living as comfortably as we are, with as good clothes as we have on, and as 
 comfortable homes as we came from? I have no doubt that many of you are 
 giving far more than that, but for every one who is giving more, there must 
 be somebody who is giving less, for the average is only twenty cents. Have we 
 not got something to do to lift up the interest and conscience and prayer-life 
 of a great body of people like you represent to-day to that place where they 
 will enter intelligently and joyfully with Christ into the work of saving the 
 world? And while jo\i have two thousand ministers here and 250,000 Chris- 
 tians to reach this million in this land. I understand that you have only got 
 fifty people to reach one million over yonder — just as large a field, and in 
 these terrible conditions that T have been tallying about this morning. In 
 other words, only one out of five tho\isand three hundred of you is willing 
 to go out into one of these other dark places. Is it really possible that Christ 
 
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Bible Conference Addresses 
 
 wants five thousand three hundred of us to plant our lives here, where the field 
 is already so fairly well occupied, and only just take one seed out of that large 
 a number and put it out in some part of the world where no seed is growing 
 at all ? I do not believe that our Lord wants as little done as that, and you raust 
 for yourselves find out how much he wants done ; but I beg of you, oh, may you 
 ask him not, "How much must I do, Lord?" but, "How much can I do, Lord?" 
 Last night over here in your Mission Board room, the Secretary took out from 
 the iron safe a couple of beautiful gold watches, and said that they came from 
 a young man and his new wife over yonder in Pennsylvania who had come to 
 the pastor of the church and said, "We have not the money that we would like 
 to have to put into this work of saving men, but we bring these watches." 
 They were worth one hundred and two dollars ; and it wasn't because they had 
 two watches apiece, either, for they said if it pleased the Secretary he might 
 give five dollars perhaps to get a cheap watch which would take the place of 
 these. But out of their love there came these gifts for the redemption of 
 men. It wasn't as much as our Lord gave vis, or you and I never would have 
 known the way of life. But if you and I will -live in that spirit," it will not be 
 long until your Church is giving far more than two-fifths of a cent a week to 
 set free the heathen people that at least the people in your Church ought to 
 set free; and as I have said to many other churches, I think they ought to 
 move out and take a larger field than this. Our little church of 125,000, only 
 half the size of yours, is trying to reach fifteen millions, and there are great 
 fields all around us that nobody is trying to reach, and I honestly believe that 
 if you set your pace and your faith to reach that million, God would widen 
 your field and possibly lead you to reach four or five millions instead of one 
 million. Over on the west coast of Africa somebody carried the gospel to a 
 young savage girl sixteen years of age, and she came into the house of God on 
 Christmas Day to bring her offering, for they have a very beautiful custom of 
 not giving their best to each other on Christmas Day, but giving the best gifts 
 to the Savior; and they come into the house of God, and after a service of 
 praise and prayer they all come in procession around the front of the church, 
 and each hands the missionary the gift he wants to give to Christ. They 
 are poor with a poverty that you and I know nothing about. If they were 
 able to bring even a small amount there, a penny, it was counted a very rich 
 gift indeed. Most of them , couldn't bring that at all; they just brought a 
 handful of vegetables from their garden, two or three potatoes, or a couple of 
 turnips, or a couple of onions. Some of them were too poor to bring that, and 
 brought just a bunch of flowers. But this girl in the procession, just saved 
 out of heathenism, out of the folds of her old dress brought a silver coin 
 worth eighty-five cents and handed that to the missionary as her gift to Christ. 
 He was so utterly astonished at the magnitude of it that he thought surely the 
 girl must have stolen it, and for a moment he was about to refuse to accept it, 
 but thought he had better take it to save confusion. At the conclusion of the 
 service he called her aside and asked her where she got that money, for it was 
 really a fortune for a girl in her condition, and she explained to him very 
 simply, that in her great desire to give to Christ an offering in some sense 
 worthy of his love and sacrifice, she had gone to a neighborhood planter and 
 bound herself out to him as a slave for the rest of her life for this eighty-five 
 
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 cents, and had brought the whole financial equivalent of her life of pledged 
 service and laid it down in a single gift at the feet of her Lord. 
 
 My brethren, I am glad to have a gospel to believe in that is capable of 
 doing that for a savage; and while I do not recommend to you that you bind 
 yourselves in slavery to any man even for Christ's sake, I ask you here to-day 
 whether there is anything so dignified, so glorious, so divine, and in the end so 
 satisfying, that we can do with this one life that we have to invest, as to bind 
 it in perpetual voluntary slavery to Jesus Christ for lost mankind's sake, and 
 to say to him, with fullness of heart and purpose, "If God will show me any- 
 thing that I can do for the redemption of this world that I have not yet done, 
 by his grace I will undertake it at once, for I cannot, I dare not, go up to 
 judgment until I have done the utmost God enables me to do to diffuse his 
 glory throughout the whole wide world." I say to you frankly that I expect to 
 be satisfied with that kind of a life purpose one hundred years from to-day. 
 Are you perfectly sure that you will be satisfied then with yours ? 
 
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 feuntiaj? Afternoon, 
 
 At 3 :00 p.Ji. Sunday, May 6, the men's service of the Y. M. C. A. was held 
 in Victoria Theatre, led by Prof. E. L. Shuey, President of the Association. 
 The service opened with song, "All hail the power of Jesns' name." This was 
 followed by a song by the chorus, assisted by the Arion Quartet. 
 
 J. Campbell White: Our Scripture lesson, first of all, is from the sixth 
 chapter of Ephesians, beginning with the tenth verse and including the seven- 
 teenth. Also, Romans, sixth chapter, twelfth to fourteenth verses inclusive, 
 and seventh chapter of Hebrews, twenty-fifth verse. Before proceeding fur- 
 ther we shall be led in prayer by Bishop Mathews. 
 
 Bishop Mathews' Prayer. 
 
 O God, we come into thy presence and look up into thy face at this time in 
 the exercise of faith. We believe in thy existence, for thou hast said he that 
 would come unto thee must believe that thou art, and that thou art a rewarder 
 of those who diligently seek thee. We believe also in thy immanence. Thou 
 art not far away from us, but thou art in our very midst, even in our hearts. 
 We would not be under the dominion of a pagan conception, which puts thee 
 so far away frorn us, but under the power of the Christian conception, thai 
 brings thee up right close to our heart, even into our soul. Thou art every- 
 where present, in the very flowers of the field, in the forces all about us thou 
 art manifesting thyself. And then we believe in thy relationships; thou art 
 Lord of the universe, thou art Lord of nature. Thou hast control of all the 
 forces about us. Thou art everywhere, ruling in the interests of righteousness 
 and truth and harmony. 
 
 O God, we pray that thou wilt come into our hearts and rule completely 
 over our entire beings. May thy divine grace have perfect dominion over us, 
 so that sin shall be dethroned, and self shall be dethroned, and Christ shall be 
 enthroned and his grace shall have complete dominion over all our powers 
 and over our entire being. And then, dear Savior, wilt thou not only come 
 into our hearts and light up every precinct of our being, and control us as we 
 give ourselves in loving and complete surrender to thee, but wilt thou make us 
 heroic, joyous, aggi-essive soldiers of thine to go forward into the thickest of 
 the battle, loyal to Jesus Christ, faithful to the truth as it is in Jesus Christ, 
 and glad of the opportunity of proclaiming the truth of Jesus everywhere and 
 exemplifying the truth revealed to us in the Word of God in our lives. Oh, 
 let thy blessing rest upon this meeting this afternoon. We thank thee for the 
 
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 meeting of this morning ; for the definitely inspired message which thy servant 
 bore to us this morning in this place; and we thank thee for the announce- 
 ment of the triumph of the gospel of Jesus Christ over the hearts of our lay- 
 men in the princely gift that was spoken of this morning, that shall help to 
 increase the efficiency and power of a Christian center. O God, may thy power 
 and thy grace and thy love come down upon us, and imder all of us who are 
 men in thy kingdom, that we shall give ourselves fully to that power and to 
 thy grace, so that we may give our time and our talent and our means and 
 all for the hastening of the kingdom of Jesus Christ in the earth. 
 
 Bless thy servant who shall speak to us this afteraoon. Thou hast given him 
 a message. Oh, help us to open our hearts to the fullest reception of thy 
 truth as he shall speak it to us, and those of us who listen, may we listen with 
 prayer, efficient, expectant prayer, that the truth, the divine truth which he 
 shall speak to us this afternoon, may hot only build us up and make us strong 
 and valiant soldiers for Christ, to go forward in the great forward movements 
 of the age for the glorification of Jesus Christ, biit also at this particular 
 time those that are not in the kingdom, and those hearts which have not en- 
 throned thee, may these men that have thought it worth while to come to this 
 service open their moral natures and receive Christ, the Savior, the elder 
 brother, the friend, the king, that he may rule their lives, and that great glory 
 may be gotten to the name of Jesus in this service, in the salvation, in the 
 quickening, in the uplifting of this large number of men that are here this 
 afternoon. 
 
 Bless the Y. M. C. A. of this city. God bless the president and all the offi- 
 cers associated with him, all the men that are upon the committee. The mem- 
 ories of other years come to us at this time, when we recall the magnificent 
 moral and spiritual achievements that have been brought about through this 
 great Christian agency. Lord God, continue its power and increase its influ- 
 ence, and may thy name be wonderfully glorified in this beautiful city that we 
 have learned to love. We ask it in Jesus' name. Amen. 
 
 Address of J. Campbell White. 
 
 I never think of this city of yours, though I have thought of it often from 
 a distance of ten thousand miles away, without thinking of the man whom I 
 first met from Dayton, and who made a powerful impression upon me then, 
 and whose life lives as an inspiration to me still. I expect to think of Mr. 
 Sinclair as long as I live, as one of the men who lived a life worth living and 
 worth imitating. 
 
 . The thirstiest men I ever saw were eight native Africans in a little sail- 
 boat out in the middle of the Red Sea. I used to suppose that the Red 
 Sea was a very small affair, about big enough to swim across or row across in a 
 boat. I have gone over it now a half dozen times, and even in one of the 
 great ocean steamers it takes three days and three nights to get from one end 
 of it to the other. It is more than a thousand miles long, farther than from 
 New York to Chicago. I got a new idea of its vastness, and it is so wide that 
 a great deal of the time one cannot see the shore on either side. 
 
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 When, out in the middle of that sea one day, about noon, we came across 
 a boat-load of native Africans, eight of them in a little sailboat. They ran 
 up a signal of distress as we came into sight, and our captain, understanding 
 the signal, ran up alongside of them and stopped to see what was the matter. 
 Although they couldn't understand a word of our language, and we not a 
 word of theirs, they very soon made known to us by signs that they were 
 hungry and thirsty. They had come out under favorable breezes from the 
 African shore, hoping to go back again at their pleasure, but the wind had 
 fallen and they couldn't row back again. They had brought veiy little food 
 and water, and, these soon exhausted, they were left in a perishing condition. 
 Of course you would not expect a boat-load of Christian men to sail away and 
 leave them in that condition. The captain supplied them with a barrel of 
 water and a bag of rice, and they partook of it without very much ceremony, 
 and seemed very well contented to wait until the breeze would spring up and 
 carry them back home. 
 
 As we sailed away from them that day I couldn't help but think that those 
 men, in their physical distress, illustrate the spiritual condition of men such 
 as I have been dealing with out in India for ten years, and such as live all 
 over the non-Christian world. Here were men with water in every direction, 
 farther than the eye could reach, yet thirsting to death for a single drinlv ; and 
 any of you who have been at sea probably know what the effect is upon a very 
 thirsty man of trying to satisfy his thirst with sea-water. Men caught out at 
 sea and carried off from ships have sometimes thought they could satisfy their 
 thirst with this; but it thrusts them into such an agony of suffering that many 
 of them lose their reason and leap overboard, committing suicide. 
 
 There are religions of some sort all over the world. No tribe has been 
 found anywhere that does not have some religious beliefs, but all non-Chris- 
 tian religions are like salt-water to a man who is thirsting to death. Instead 
 of in any measure satisfying his thirst, they merely aggravate it. I have been 
 living for ten years among men who have been trying in all sorts of foolish 
 ways to gratify, to satisfy their heart's hunger for God. They have not been 
 able to do it. Go to the old men who have spent a lifetime walls;ing up and 
 down in India trying to find out some spiritual message that would bring them 
 peace, and ask them whether they have found it, and they will all shake their 
 heads, and indicate "No, no, I have not found it yet." They hope to some- 
 time later on, perhaps. The great trouble with all religions, apart from Chris- 
 tianity, is that not one of them has a decent conception of the character of 
 God. You can't build a religion without that. The Bible reveals God to us 
 in his perfection. The first reason which it brings to us for a new life is that 
 it brings to us the conception of what a holy life is; and nobody has that who 
 does not have the Bible. Sometime ago an African chief was presented with 
 a looking-glass. It was the first time he had ever seen a mirror, and the first 
 time he ever saw himself. He was a hideous fellow, and when he ?aw his own 
 face for the. first time he was so impressed with his own ugliness that he 
 smashed that looking-glass to pieces. He never wanted to see himself again. 
 But the breaking of the glass didn't change his ugliness. The Bible is a mir- 
 ror of character. By looking into it we can see ourselves as we are; and it is 
 not a very pleasant sight. But the only way to be changed is to keep looking 
 
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Union Biblical Seminary 
 
 until God's character is so impressed upon us that we are changed into its 
 likeness; and the reason the Bible reveals us to ourselves is because it reveals 
 God to us, and he is so different from us that we see the contrast. It is a holy 
 God who is here revealed, than whom we cannot conceive any one more per- 
 fect. 
 
 Somebody was making fun of a man who had recently been converted. He 
 said, "What kind of a God do you worship, anyhow, a big God or a little God ? 
 I would like to have you tell me about him." The poor, ignorant fellow didn't 
 know very much, but God taught him something, and he said to the man, "My 
 God is so big that the heaven of heavens cannot contain him, and he is so 
 little that he dwells in my heart." That is the kind of a God for all men to 
 have — that is the kind of a God without whom no man of us can live a life 
 worth while; a God so pure that no one of us can see him without being self- 
 condemned; a God so tender that far more loving than any mother's touch is 
 his. The Bible says : "Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should 
 not have compassion on the son of her womb? Yea, they may forget, yet will 
 I not forget thee." God is more tender than any of ovir mothers. He laid 
 down life itself for you and me, and that means infinite love; a God so power- 
 ful that just the moving of a little bit of the earth, which is only just one 
 fraction of this physical universe, upsets a whole city, and hundred of millions 
 of dollars are destroyed. I am glad my God is powerful enough to hold me 
 if I trust him. It is a very strange thing that any man will try to exclude a 
 God like that from his heart; a God without whom we could not live for a 
 moment ; for he is the one in whom our breath is, and whose are all our ways. 
 A God from whom to be separated forever is the greatest conceivable misery; 
 whether that is in the next life or this, it is hell to be separated from God. 
 Hell is anjTvhere where a man is shiitting God out of his life. The heathen 
 doesn't know how to find God, but you and I do. Isn't it a strange thing that 
 any one of us should fail to find him? Another thing that no heathen has is 
 any decent idea of a right standard of morality. They have books on religion. 
 Yes, but there is no more moral teaching in most of them than there is in an 
 average dime novel in America ; and many of these boolvs are much more in- 
 decent than much of the cheapest, vilest literature that is published from our 
 press here. There is a great deal of it that dare not be translated into the 
 English language at all. A man was arrested a few weeks ago in Bombay, 
 India, for attempting to translate some extracts from some of the religious 
 books in India. It was not very long ago that a mother in northwest India 
 came to one of the missionaries, and apologized for having saved the little 
 girl baby she held in her arms. She said, "My priest says I should kill it. 
 I have already killed five. I suppose I should have killed this one, 
 but some way I couldn't find it in my heart to do it." Imagine a 
 mother apologizing for not having murdered the sixth one of her own 
 family. That is the kind of confusion of moral standard there is all over 
 the heathen world. If a Hindoo were to accept a glass of water or a piece of 
 bread from you, that would be the unpardonable sin of Hindooism. He would 
 be thrown out of his caste at once, and not be permitted to remain a member 
 of his circle. He might break every command of the Bible from one end to the 
 other without any question ever being raised as to his orthodoxy as a Hindoo. 
 
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 And even the moral standards they have, the sense of right that still clings to 
 their hearts in spite of all their falsities, and lies, and superstition, they are 
 not even able to live up to ; for they don't know of the armor of God that we 
 were reading about over in Ephesians. Men are wrestling as Paul clearly 
 recognized; and all of us, if we are sensible, will recognize, our fight is not 
 against flesh and blood. It is not on even temis, this fight with sin. We are fight- 
 ing with supernatural powers, that are stronger than any man; and the only 
 hope for victory by any one is that he shall discover other supernatural forces 
 whicli are stronger still. If you don't know God I know something about you, 
 and that is that you have never fouud out how to fight successfully your temp- 
 tations. I don't care who you are, I don't care how strong a will you have got, 
 I know this : that either you know Christ or you know slavery. I have fought 
 with sin as desperately as most men, and I thought for a long time that a man 
 could overcome it ; but I have changed my mind now. There is a passage over 
 in James, the fourth chapter, seventh verse, that says, "Resist the devil and he 
 will flee from you." How often we hear that quoted. I used to think that 
 was possible. It is not; it is not so. But you say it is in the Bible. I know 
 it is in the Bible, but it is not so. "Resist the devil and he will flee from 
 j'ou," taken alone, out of its context, is a false theoiy of life. You want to 
 get it in its comiection. Supposing you had hydrophobia and were going to 
 die, and some great specialist who knew how to deal with your trouble came 
 along and said, "Here is a prescription which has been- discovered that will 
 save you, although you are almost gone. It consists of three ingredients; you 
 get them at the chemist's next door, and tal^e a dose of it as soon as possible." 
 I go into the chemist's, for my friend, and he says, "I have got lots of the 
 second ingredient there, but I haven't got any of the first or any of the third ; 
 shall I just give you three times as much of the second as is asked for of 
 that?" Wliat would the effect probably be on the man? It is just as likely to 
 kill him as to help him. This is a divine prescription in which that sentence 
 occurs; but it is only one-third of it. Listen to the other two-thirds: "Sub- 
 mit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. 
 Draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you." And the three parts are, 
 first, submit to God; then resist for all I am worth; and then reliance upon 
 the omnipotence of Jehovah. That will work; but resistance alone will not, 
 and I know it by many a failure in my own life. If you thinly you are strong 
 enough to fight the devil successfully, you are deceived. You can't do it. He 
 will bring you into ruin eternal if he can get you to believe that you are strong 
 enough to resist him. You say, "I am not serving the devil ; I am just doing 
 as I please." That is all he wants — just let yourself go; that is all the devil 
 wants — anything to keep you away from a pure, holy, godly life. That is the 
 service of the devil, letting yourself go and serving yourself. Oh, he is very 
 subtle, and he has got men of all ages in all nations serving hiin; but you 
 will wake up sometime to an awful revelation and an awful regret, if you do 
 not find out the secret of victory through Jesus Christ alone. 
 
 I heard out in the western part of Kansas a friend of mine from Egyi^t 
 telling a story about a hospital after a fight. The main doctor was going from 
 one cot to another examining what was the matter with the men, some of 
 them with arms shot off, some with legs, some with bullets in their bodies, and 
 
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Union Biblical Seminary 
 
 otherwise. He came to a man with a terrible foot, and he saw that the only- 
 way of saving the man's life was to have that man's leg cut off. There was a 
 slate at the top of each cot. He wrote on that the simple word, "Amputate." 
 His assistants were coming along behind and carrying out his instructions. 
 After the doctor passed on to the next cot this man was so anxious to see what 
 the instructions were that he turned around and looked up and saw that word 
 "Amputate." He knew what it meant. He couldn't think of the possibility 
 of losing his leg, and so he just reached up and wiped it out. The doctors 
 came along in a few minutes and saw him there, looked at the slate, saw that 
 there was nothing to do, and walked on. The poison went through his system, 
 and in a few hours he was dead. He saved his leg, but he lost his life. You 
 can save your sin if you like, but it will eat your soul out. 
 
 Wlien I was coming home from India, all around over the boat there were 
 signs up to have all yovir valuables locked up in the safe; that the ship's com- 
 pany would not hold itself responsible for anything lost or stolen unless you 
 did that. Some of my friends here who have been on the sea know all about 
 it. Well, I thought I had very little that was of any value, and so I just kept 
 my money in my pocket. I didn't have any jewelry, but I had some money. 
 When we go traveling around the world we generally get it in gold — English 
 gold is good anywhere. I had a lot of these sovereigns in my pocket. One 
 morning I waked up to find I was five sovereigns short — twenty-five dollars 
 short. Then I went and had the rest locked up. Most of the ^vomen were 
 wiser, and they took their vakiables and had them locked up at the start, re- 
 ceiving from the purser a receipt showing how many things were in his safe 
 custody. The last day before they get off the boat at the end of the trip, they 
 go and present the receipt and get all those things back. There was a concert 
 on board the boat one night and some of the ladies wanted some of their fine 
 earrings and other jewelry to wear, and they went and got them out for the 
 evening. At the end of the concert, without being willing to keep them over 
 night, they would go and have them locked up again. Pretty ^oon after the 
 concert was over and the women had- taken their jewelry off and turned it 
 over to the purser, the purser came hurriedly to one of the cabins where one 
 of the ladies was that turned over a lot of her valuables, and held up her ring, 
 a gold band ring, in which there had been a Tery valuable diamond. He 
 showed her that the diamond wasn't there, and said, of course, he wanted her 
 to see this at once, as he wouldn't be held responsible for giving her a diamond 
 at the end of the trip that wasn't turned over to him. They instantly con- 
 cluded that it must have been lost up on deck while tliey were having the con- 
 cert. They went up and hunted all around, and under the glare of an electric 
 light they found it for her — a verj' valuable stone that liad dropped out. She 
 turned that over with the gold band to the purser and he went away com- 
 fortable and locked it up. At the end of the trip she got it all. The ship's 
 company held itself responsible for everything that was turned over to it. 
 But it would be a very strange ship company that would want to be held re- 
 sponsible for things people don't turn over to them. God holds himself respon- 
 sible for what you and I tvirn over to him, but for nothing more. Paul said, 
 "I know him whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able to keep 
 that which I have committed unto him." But God can't keep what you don't 
 
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 commit. God is almighty, but he can't keep your life unless you give it to 
 him. Have you given it to him, or are you trying to keep it yourself? 
 
 I know a man very intimately who tried to fight sin for a long time with 
 all the strength of will that a man can put into a fight. He finally, after re- 
 peated failures, got to the point where in desperation one day he took his 
 knife out of his pocket. He thought he would make it sure now. He opened 
 the knife, and pushing his sleeve up, ran his knife into his flesh. When it 
 began to bleed he took a pen and dipped it into his own blood, and wrote out 
 on a sheet of paper, "I will never again yield to this temptation," and signed 
 his name. That was determination, wasn't it? That was desperation. Did it 
 work ? Of course not. He had not learned the secret yet. He went on failing 
 until he learned this other secret that T have been telling you men about — that 
 all victory begins in suiTender to God as the only safe keeper of life. I wish 
 I could get you men to believe that with all your heart, and the way I see 
 some of you looking away from me I know you don't believe it. I understand 
 it perfectly well when you get nervous and look away. Some of you went out 
 a few moments ago. It is easy enough to get away frommy voice. Men, it 
 is easy enough to get away from God if you are determined to. It is easy 
 enough for you to ruin your life if you choose, if that is what you want to do 
 with your life. You have got the choice to make. Go ahead. Biit, oh, may 
 God save you from that kind of following. My friend Eddy was tallving to a 
 crowd of students over in India a few years ago; I guess you know of Mr. 
 Eddy here in Dayton, he having once been here. A great man, and a man of 
 God. He brought a thousand men to Christ in a single year over there in 
 India. He was once taU-cing to a crowd of men, students, Hindoos, a crowd of 
 men who had come into that audience not to get good, but to do harm. One 
 of them, the ringleader, because he couldn't do all the harm he wanted to do 
 himself, organized a society to help him do harm; and they called it the devil's 
 society. They made him the secretary of it, this ringleader. The whole crowd 
 came into this service aiming to see how much harm they could do. They 
 were going to watch the men who were favorably impressed with the truth, 
 and they would fix them. They would take one out and tie him to a tree and 
 beat him with bamboo sticks until he was nearly dead. They would take 
 another and give him some terrible drug, and lock him up in a room with a 
 great lot of naked women to see what the efl:"ect would be on him. That is the 
 kind of a method they used in trying to dissuade men from the better life. 
 But as my friend spoke the truth went to the heart of this secretary of the 
 devil's society himself. He saw himself for the first time. A whole lot of you 
 men have never seen yourselves as God looks at you. He saw himself, and he 
 saw what an ugly, wicked, hideous creature, full of sin, he was. lie saw that 
 somebody was being held up who might help him, and he was attracted to 
 Christ, and he shook like a leaf as the Spirit of God carried this truth to his 
 heart. My friend noticed his agitation, and at the close of the service he 
 sought him out, and they went out for a walk and talked together. My friend 
 said to him: "This is the Savior you need; you can't get along without him. 
 You are not too bad for him to save. He came to save the worst oi men. He 
 will save everybody who will let him. He will come into your life and wipe 
 out all the black past; he will come into you with his own divine energy, 
 
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 and enable you to live a victorious life; he will make a messenger of his out 
 of you, and help you to go out and tell other men how to get free from the 
 bondage of slavery and sin." My friend didn't conceal from him the fact 
 that it would cost him something to do this. He said: "When you go back 
 to your old Hindoo father and mother, and tell them you are going to follow 
 Christ, they will cast you out of their house forever. They will never give 
 you a meal, or another penny with which to go to school. They will persecute 
 you and tiy to kill you. This society you have organized will treat you, pos- 
 sibly, just as you were going to treat other men. You will have to be ready 
 for almost anything if you are going to follow Christ." The man saw that it 
 was going to cost something to follow the Savior. He saw that it was going to 
 cost a deal more not to follow him, and he decided to do it. It was only a few 
 days until he was baptized, professing his faith in the Savior. It wasn't very 
 many more days until he joined a band of Christian workers and started 
 around from one village to another. He went all around through that coun- 
 try, proclaiming everywhere his new-found Savior; and the man's trans- 
 formed life was a more powerful message even than his wonderful story, and 
 he was able to lead a great many other men out into the joy and liberty of the 
 sons of God. 
 
 There isn't any man in all the world too bad to be saved if he is willing to 
 be saved. There isn't anybody in the world so good that God can save him 
 against his will. You and I decide everything almost by our will. We can 
 do what we want to do. We choose our own destiny and our own eternity. 
 God makes it possible for us to be clean, victorious, useful, self-respecting 
 men if we choose to be; but there is no possibility of being all that without 
 divine help ; and his help is available to every man who will accept it and 
 join his kingdom. There isn't any message that men everywhere need like 
 that. If I had never seen one of you before, I would know that from my 
 contact with other men half-way aroimd the world. Every man is tempted, 
 you and I, the bishops, all the rest, are tempted men. Another thing is true 
 of us all. We have all yielded to temptation, every one; and some of us have 
 gone a step farther down still, and have deliberately been the tempters of 
 other men and women. God save us from getting that low doMai. Thank 
 God, there are steps up as well as steps down. A great many of us who have 
 been tempted, and who have fallen, have learned the way of overcoming temp- 
 tation. That is a step higher than being tempted, overcoming temptation, 
 not only the little temptations, but the big ones. There is power enough in 
 God to enable a man to be victorious even at his weakest point; otherwise 
 Christ's salvation Avould be worth nothing to a man. There are steps higher 
 up still than victory over temptation. There is another step — helping other 
 men to overcome temptation. I hope we are all going to get on to that plane. 
 There is another step a little higher still^ — outgrowing some of the tempta- 
 tions that possibly may have been very powerful at the early stage of our 
 lives ; overcoming by keeping in fellowship with God and showing those about 
 Tis to him. Wlien I was a boy they used to do a good deal of talking about saying 
 "No." I think there is some virtue in saying "No," but I believe there is a 
 good deal more virtue in saying "Yes" to the right parties. . If a man will 
 always say "Yes" to Christ, he will not have to say "No" very much. It is the 
 
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 positive life that we need. Overcome evil with good, and the man who is 
 throwing his life into doing the right thing won't have a very hard fight with 
 these baser temptations. It is the man who is trying to stand still and fight 
 backwards that doesn't get anywhere. That is saying "No." Saying "Yes" 
 is going right out into the thick of the fight where men are falling, in the 
 presence of foes too strong for any man, and helping the man up into a decent, 
 glorious, divine life. Is that the business you are at? It is the only thing 
 worth living for. I am not a bishop, nor a preacher. I never expect to be. I 
 am a layman, a farmer, if you like; the farm is whei'e I spent most of my life; 
 but I know God, and I know what he can do in a life like mine. I know that 
 any man who is as completely in slavery to sin as I was, and who has been set 
 free, has found a prescription which will work in every case where men will 
 try. I don't take, I don't dare take, my life out of Christ's hands for a day or 
 an hour. I wouldn't be safe from now until midnight if I said to Christ, 
 "Now, you go away and let me alone for a half dozen hours," nor would 
 anybody else. Some Christian men do that. I have done it myself some- 
 times, since I was first forgiven of my sins. I have said, "Lord, now you go 
 off and just let me take my own course, and let myself go for a while." Oh, 
 what a fool a man is when he lets himself go ! But tjur lives are safe when 
 they are in his keeping, and just as long as they are in his keeping, and we 
 never fall into sin until we decide to do it. Did you ever think of that? 
 No man ever yields until his will yields, and then the whole man is gone. 
 
 I heard of a man giving a course of lectures away over there in Beirut, 
 Syria, on these subjects, and I thinlv I never heard of a course of subjects 
 more appropriate. "I Am" was the first on^; "I Think," "I Can," "I Ought," 
 and "I Will." That is the nearest divinity that it is possible to get. "I will ;" 
 that is what decides tilings. Have you decided that you will live ••! godly life 
 by the presence and power of God in your daily life? I am talking to profess- 
 ing Christian men as well as to those who are not. The shame of the church 
 is that so many of lis who are members of it are willing to live a defeated life, 
 and that is the reason a whole lot of the men outside of the cKurch do not 
 think we have got a religion worth possessing, and we do not think we have 
 got a religion worth passing on. That is the reason why some of j^ou men do 
 not believe in foreign missions. You do not believe in home missions, either. 
 You do not believe in your own salvation ; and possibly some time, whether 
 you are a member of a church or not, you will wake up to the fact that you 
 were never saved at all. It will be a terrible awakening; but if you have not 
 got a religion worth passing on, I ask you to examine very carefully whether 
 you have got any religion at all that has any power in your own life. I am 
 willing to lay down my life, to pass my religion on to the other man, because 
 I have got something worth believing and worth sacrificing for; and if the 
 thing at stake is big enough, worth dying for, I am not afraid to die if I can 
 do something worth while by it. What are you living for? What are your 
 heart enjoyments ? Have you got something that will satisfy you even in your 
 sober moments now, or are you the victim of some habit that is sapping your 
 manhood and makes it impossible for you to respect yourself and to look the 
 other man straight in the eye ? The devil will trip us up if he can. Let us not 
 let him do it. Let us be men, soldiers, fighters, winners. Every man likes to 
 
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 be on the winning side. I never used to like to play on a football team that 
 got beat very much. If any of you fellows play on a baseball team, you want 
 to be on the victorious team. If any of you went to war, you would want to 
 be on the winning side, though it cost everything. I want to tell you men 
 soraething. The men who stand with Jesus Christ are going to be on the 
 winning side just as sure as you live, and it is the only side that can win ; and 
 if you want to be on the winning side, get alongside of him as quickly as pos- 
 sible, and stay there. 
 
 "Choose I must, and soon must choose holiness or heaven lose : 
 If what heaven loves I hate, shut from me is heaven's gate. 
 Endless sin means endless woe; into endless sin I go; 
 If my soul from reason rent, take from sin its final bent ; 
 Light obeyed increaseth light, light resisted bringeth night. 
 Who will give me will to choose, if the love of light I lose? 
 Haste, my soul, this instant yield; let the light its scepter wield, 
 Wliile my God prolongeth grace, haste thee to this holy face." 
 
 Will you let him be the Lord and Savior of your life, whether you call your- 
 self a Christian or not? 
 
 ««^ 
 
 Prayer. 
 
 O God, our Father, it is a very blessed thing that thou hast revealed thyself 
 to us in all the tenderness, and more, of a mother, and in all the power to save 
 that thy omnipotence can command. We thank thee for thy promise that sin 
 shall not have dominion over us, and thy command is, "Present yourself unto 
 God." And we pray that all of us may be wise enough to follow thy definite 
 instruction, and let thee do for us and in us what no man of us can do for 
 himself. We pray that thou wilt first of all forgive our past, no matter how 
 black it may be; for there is no man of us who has sunk so low that thou canst 
 not lift him up and set his feet upon a rock, and there is no one of us who is 
 so in bondage to any temptation, no matter what it is, that thou art not able 
 to set him free from it and keep him free from it by divine power. And 
 whether we are professing Christians or not, Lord, we need thee above every- 
 thing else, and we need thee every hour. We cannot get along without thee, and 
 we pray that we may to-day have a faith that will take thee at fhy word and 
 let thee come into our lives in fiillness, and just make us like thyself, the kind 
 of men who go about everywhere, as our friend Sinclair used to do, helping other 
 men. We pray thou wilt make us like our Ix)rd. We thank thee that he has helped 
 so many men into a better life, that he is helping so many now, and that there 
 are a good many of us who know what it is to be saved and to be kept just so 
 far as we are willing to be kept. ^Vhen we have fallen and brought disgrace 
 upon thee, it has not been thy fault, Lord. We want to say that to thee 
 franlvly, no failure of ours is chargeable to thee. Thy power has been great 
 enough to keep us always if we would let thee do it; but we have taken our 
 
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 lives out of thy keeping, then we have gotten into trouble. Lord, wilt thou 
 forgive us for these failures and for this foolishness, and for any false pride 
 that we may have, thinlving that we are strong enough to do this business 
 alone? Lord, wilt thou keep the devil from beguiling us by that kind of temp- 
 tation? Oh, help us to see that for every one of us, without any exception, 
 there is just one way to keep right, and that is by the way of Christ and the 
 cross and the presence of God in our lives. Since it is possible to have this 
 .gift, and to have it now, and have it always, just by taking it, make us wise 
 men to-day to decide to take it. Give us the will, we pray thee, to choose the 
 right thing, and to choose it without dallying about it and so giving the devil 
 a further chance to win us away by his forces. Wilt thou, we pray thee, come 
 upon us all by thine own loving, tender spirit, and woo us to thyself. Oh, 
 help us this hour to decide for Christ, that everything shall be surrendered to 
 him; that no sin shall be clung to, no matter how little it may seem, or how 
 secret. O God, help us to be done with those things that are not helping us 
 for peace, purity, and power. Do help us, we pray thee, those of us who have 
 believed in thee for forgiveness, and who know something about that power. 
 Lord, help us to entrust ourselves to thee utterly,, that we may be the kind of 
 men who will be good advertisements for thee, and who will show to other 
 men that are a little doubtful about whether there is anything in this, that 
 there is everything in it, and that Christ is abundantly able to save. And wilt 
 thou attract to thyself any men who are here to-day who have never even been 
 forgiven of their sins and never made any public profession of thee. O God, 
 grant them grace to decide to assert themselves; may their wills be moved, 
 and may they say, "Yes, Christ, I accept thy forgiveness. Yes, Lord, I 
 accept thy power of keeping in the hours of temptation;" and so may many 
 of us this afternoon enter upon a higher plane of life than we have known 
 before, and we know that as the result of it the world will be better, and our 
 lives will be a great deal happier, and we will be a great deal more useful and 
 successful in everything we undertake. So do thou hear us and help us and 
 move us all utterly by thy Spirit to thine own choices for us, in the name of 
 our Lord. Amen. 
 
 The Arion Quartet sang, "Hark, the Spirit's voice is saying." 
 Mr. White: I am not going to leave this whole thing depend on my state- 
 ment and my testimony. There are men here who know just as much about 
 Christ as I do, and by the mouth of more than one witness things are more 
 firmly established. We have not time for any more speeches, but we have time 
 to hear from some of you men, who in a single sentence might tell out of your 
 own experience whether or not the things 1 have been saying about Christ are 
 true. I don't know any reason why you shouldn't do that. I wish we might 
 have some testimonies of that kind for the sake of any men who may be in 
 doubt about it. May we not hear in just a minute or two from a number of 
 you men, who know that Christ is able to save and keep ? 
 
 One-half hour was given to the hearing of testimonies, and the time was 
 well improved, as scores testified as to the experiences of God in their lives. 
 
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Unioft Biblical Seminary 
 
 The Arion Quartet then sang, " 'T is the old-time religion, it is good enough 
 for me." 
 
 Mr. White : I thank you. It is good enough for us all ; and we can all have 
 it, and we can all have it now; but none of us will get it unless we take it. 
 I am going to ask Doctor Punk to lead us in a closing prayer, that we may all 
 go out to a greater life of victory than we have ever known before. 
 
 Doctor Funk's Prayer. 
 
 O God, our Father, we do thank thee for this service. We thank thee that 
 our hearts have been given to Jesus Christ; that in that surrender we have 
 agreed to follow him; and this afternoon with gladness we look up into his 
 face and confess him and covenant anew to follow him. O Holy Spirit, seal 
 our covenants just now, and may we realize as we go out from this place that 
 we are stronger to meet temptation ; that we have been filled with the spirit of 
 power from thee. O God, and that in this strength we can do service for him. 
 We pray thy blessing upon the word that has come to these men, to us, this 
 afternoon; may it bear fruit in our lives. O God, help this man close here 
 not simply to surrender his money, but to give himself unto the€. O God, 
 thou dost ask for his heart; help him to give his heart to thee. Hear us for 
 the work of this great Association in this city. Send thou thy Spirit to each 
 member, and may the men of this city be brought to the life of Jesus Christ, 
 and may the power of sin not have dominion over them. Hear us; in Jesus' 
 name we ask it. Amen. 
 
 Mr. White: Now, let us all stand, men, and unite in the Lord's Prayer. 
 The audience arose and repeated the Lord's Prayer with Mr. White, after 
 which they were dismissed. 
 
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 ^undap Ctieninff.' 
 
 Sunday Evening, 7:30, May 6, 1906. 
 
 The meeting at Summit Street Church was the closing of the baccalaureate 
 services. 
 
 The Arion Quartet sang "Rock of Ages," after which the congregation 
 joined in singing, "Worship the King." 
 
 Mr. White read the 145th Psalm/ and led in 
 
 Prayer. 
 
 O God, our Father, we thank thee that we have a God like this, that we 
 know thee whom to know is life eternal ; that thou dost satisfy every longing 
 of our souls, and that thou dost fill us with the confident assurance of eternal 
 happiness in thy fellowship. We thank thee that when once we abandon our- 
 selves to thee and thy will, thot; dost give us a joy unspeakable and full of 
 glory. We thank thee, Lord, for all the way by Avhich thou hast led us, and all 
 the proofs we have of thy loving-kindness and thy faitlifulness. ISTot one word 
 has failed of all that thou hast promised to be and to do. All failures of our 
 past lives we hold ourselves accountable for. We know it is not becaiTse thou 
 hast not been able to save us utterly, that we have not been always fully saved. 
 It has been oiir own fault when we have fallen into disobedience and fruitless- 
 ness and coldness, and we take the blame and we ask for thy forgiveness. We 
 know that thou art able to keep us if we will let thee do it, and therefore we 
 pray that we may come to the point where we shall let thee have thy way. We 
 do pray that we may see the wisdom of turning over the control of life to the 
 One who knows most about it, and who is able to guide it and direct it in a 
 way that will satisfy oiirselves. Our own experiments with our lives have been 
 very unsatisfactory. Every time we have followed our own course we have got 
 into trouble and into sin, and had to confess it with shanie and start over 
 again ; but every time we have followed thee, even thoiigh the way hasn't 
 seemed very clear, we have come out into larger light and larger blessings and 
 larger usefulness. Why can't we learn the lesson of following thee all the 
 time ? Wilt thou help us to be wise learners in thy school, and to let thee teach 
 us that it is safe to follow God and safe to tr\ist him, and that the only wis- 
 dom is in doing his will ? We thank thee for the way thou hast led and guided 
 us during these past two or three days, for the way thou hast manifested thy- 
 self to our innermost hearts, for the weaknesses thou hast revealed to us all in 
 our own lives; but we also thank thee for the mighty strength thou hast re- 
 vealed in Christ that is available for us every one, and, oh, help us, we pray 
 thee to-night again to be brought into such face-to-face touch with thee that 
 
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 we shall each receive from thee the thing we most need. Show us, we pray 
 thee, Lord, where the great weaknesses of our lives are, and may we come to 
 thee to be satisfied. We thank thee that our God is able to supply every need 
 of ours according to his riches in glory in Jesus Christ. May we let thee sat- 
 isfy us. Lord, and do it now, and we pray that no one may go away to-night 
 with a hungry, unsatisfied heart. Oh, may our wills be moved by the Spirit to 
 take by appropriating faith of the riches that God is oifering to us all, and go 
 out into the world as his soldiers and ambassadors, to change this world 
 through thy mighty working in and through us. The world needs -changing. 
 Thou hast said that it will be changed, and that the day is coming when the 
 earth shall be full of the knowledge of the glory of God, even as the waters 
 fill the sea; and thou hast said that thy people are to be the instruments in 
 bringing this about, and thou dost wish us to be these instruments, and we 
 pray that we may not hinder thee, but in whatever way thou canst use us, help 
 us to lend ourselves to thee for thy use. What a glorious thing it is that we 
 have a chance to be the tools of God in transforming the world, in bringing 
 inexpressible and endless peace and joy into coiintless other lives, in having 
 them share with us these things that are so precious to us that there isn't gold 
 enough in the world to buy them away from us. Oh, we thank thee, Lord, for 
 what we have in Christ. Help us, we pray thee, to share it just as far as we 
 can possibly reach, with our brother men. If any one has come in here to-night 
 who has not yet really made personal connections with thee, Lord, may those 
 connections be made here to-night. We pray that by the overshadowing pres- 
 ence of the Spirit of God working in all our hearts, we may be wooed and won 
 to the Savior, as the only one who can meet our need and satisfy our longing 
 souls. And wilt thou direct this meeting to-night, step by step, according to 
 thine own prearranged plan. Thou hast a perfect plan for it, although we 
 have very little plan of any kind, but let thy plan be unfolded and entered 
 into, and let us all be willing tools in thy hands to say anything that ought to 
 be said, to do anything thy Spirit suggests, whether we have thought of doing 
 it before or not, and may we have a demonstration here to-night of what the 
 Spirit of God can do with a meeting when people lend themselves to him. May 
 we have the liberty of utterance and the unity of spirit, and the pervasive 
 spirit of tender brotherly kindness and sympathy that always comes where the 
 Spirit of God is allowed to come and have his way. And so wilt thou make us 
 all better men and women and children because of meeting thee here and 
 having this fellowship in thy presence. May we go out to a larger life and a 
 larger service and a larger usefulness than oiir lives have ever known before, 
 for we ask it expectantly in the name of him who is worthy and who has told 
 us to pray in his name, and he has said to us that whatsoever we ask in his 
 name, that will he do, and we praise thee for what thou art going to do for us 
 through him. Amen. 
 
 Song No. 221, "Holy Spirit, Faithful Guide," was then sung. 
 
 Address by J. Campbell White. 
 
 This meeting was not in the original program, and I have been so busy with 
 other things to-day that I confess I almost lost sight of it — almost, until I 
 
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 came into the meeting here and saw this andience. It is hard, when one sees 
 a crowd, not to realize that it is there. It is easy to walk by sight in that case, 
 I was. thinking of the delegates from outside, particularly those that would 
 want to have a part in this service before it closes ; but possibly for the sake ' 
 of those who have not been here at the previous sessions, and I imagine there 
 are qviite a number of that kind, I had better say a few things, to sort of gather 
 up the spirit of the conference a little bit, although you will have to excuse 
 me if it does not hang together the way the addresses do of the preachers gen- 
 erally. You will have to make a good many allowances for me these days, 
 when you remember that I am not a preacher at all. 
 
 I feel like saying, first of all, that my heart is full of praise to (>od for the 
 clear evidences of his love during these last three days. I have been doing a 
 good deal of talking of one kind and another to our own churches, but I con- 
 fess that when your committee asked me to come down and talk to you here 
 day after day for two or three days, I really was almost afraid to try it, and 
 hesitated more about accepting this invitation than anything I have had to 
 consider for a long time. And so it is with real appreciation of the fact that 
 God has helped us through, that I speak as I do to-night. 
 
 I have been conscious from day to day that he was deciding on the subjects 
 to be spoken about and has been leading in the proceedings, and I believe all 
 of us have been conscious that he has been here, and this gives me fresh faith 
 to undertake other things that I have not tried before. I suspect we have got 
 to go on learning all through our lives to do unusual things if we fire going to 
 do all the things God wants us to do, and I confess to you that this experience 
 here has been about as unvisual an experience as I have had in my life. But 
 I believe God is willing to carry any of us through anything he definitely pvits 
 us into, and I wish we could learn that lesson for the whole church, for, after 
 all, that is a question with which we are confronted — a question of whether or 
 not it is possible to obey God. There are a whole lot of people who don't be- 
 lieve it is, and that is the reason we are not going out to the conquest of the 
 world. You talk to people and say to them, that we ought to evangelize the whole 
 world, and they say, "Wliy, it is rubbish; it is nonsense; it is fanaticism; you 
 can't do it." Well, God said we should do it, and that ought to settle it. God 
 said we should preach the gospel to every creature, and if he had not meant it, 
 he wouldn't have said it; and if it were not possible he wouldn't have said it; 
 and the only thing that makes it impossible is our unbelief. I wish we might 
 have a faith like that which characterized Carey one hundred years ago when 
 he stopped cobbling shoes and w?nt out to India as a pioneer missionary, 
 taking as the keynote of his life, "Expect great things from God and attempt 
 great things for God." He didn't have very much encouragement; even the 
 preachers in the conference thought he had better sit down and let God look 
 after this thing himself; if God had wanted the heathen saved he would have 
 done it long ago himself without Carey's puny cooperation. It showed how 
 far they had gotten away from the divine standard; for God always said that 
 he meant to do his work through us, and that he had chosen the weak things of 
 the world to confound the mighty, and he was waiting for somebody who would 
 trust him and obey hiui, to begin one of the mightiest movements of modern 
 history. It was the same kind of faith that Adoniram Judson had when he went 
 
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Union Biblical Seminary 
 
 out as the first missionary to Biirmah in connection with the Baptist Church. 
 He had to work seven years before he won the first man to Christ. A friend 
 of his wrote to him after he had been working' away there for a long time, and 
 said, "Mr. Judson, what are the prospects?" and he wrote back, "The prospects 
 are as bright as the promises of God." They are as bright as that yet; and 
 God's promises include the conquest of this world and its 'subjection to him; 
 and it is time we would trust them and walk out on them to victory. It took a 
 good deal of faith for Morrison to go out to China about one hundred years ago. 
 He was working in an office in London, and when it was announced around 
 among the men in the office that he had decided to go out as a missionary to 
 China, they came to him one after another and told him how foolish it was. 
 "Why," they said, "do you expect to be able to change those Chinese, who have 
 gone on with their foolish heathen superstitions for himdreds of years?" Mor- 
 rison said, "No, I don't expect to be able to change them ; but God can." And 
 God is doing it ; tens of thousands of them to-day are worshiping God as truly 
 as you are. Thousands of them three or four years ago preferred to have their 
 heads cut off rather than deny their Lord. A friend of mine working up in 
 north China, in charge of a congregation of one hundred and twenty-five 
 people, kept them together and shielded them from danger as long as he could, 
 and when they were finally scattered like sheep among the wolves, and they 
 gathered them up, or tried to, when it was all over — two hundred and fifty, I 
 ought to have said — when they gathered them up, only half of them were left, 
 one hundred and twenty-five; and of the whole crowd of two hundred 
 and fifty, only one had saved his life by denying his Lord. I wonder 
 what congregation woiild stand that test in our country. God can change the 
 Chinese, and he is doing it, and we shall have a million Chinese turning to 
 God in a single year, and year after year, before long; and then it will go up to 
 four or five millions a year. I hope to live to see the day when they report the 
 Chinese converts by tens of millions in single years. It has got to be some- 
 thing like that, for four hundred millions of them die every generation and 
 four hundred millions of new ones come on, and you have got to save them at 
 the rate of ten or fifteen millions a year to get them all saved in a generation. 
 
 I wish we had the kind of faith that Eauch had as ntissionary to the North 
 American Indians. He woi'ked away among the red savages for a long time 
 without seeming to make any impression on them. He finally wrote back to a 
 friend, saying, "I must believe what is apparently quite impossible when I be- 
 lieve that any of these poor savages will ever become humble Christians." But 
 he added, "No door closed and barred by the devil is so strong that Jesus 
 Christ cannot burst it open." And in that kind of confidence he lived on and 
 worked on and prayed on until hundreds of these savages flung open the doors 
 of their hearts to the incoming of the Son of God. 
 
 What we need to-day above everything else is an all-conquering faith that 
 God can do what he said he would do, and that he can do it through us if we 
 will let him. 
 
 There are two theories of the Christian church. One is that it is a fort and 
 its members are guards, and their chief dtity is to hold the fort and keep the 
 devil from making any fresh encroachments. A good many of your churches 
 have been working that way, with the result that they have not even held the 
 
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 fort ; the devil has got on the inside, and we never will hold the fort unless we 
 try to do more. The other theory is that the church of Christ is an army of 
 universal conquest, and that under the leadership of the Great Captain of our 
 Salvation we are here to transform the world. And when we live in that kind 
 of spirit we don't need to sing, "Hold the fort," for we are going to capture 
 the other man's fort, the devil's fort. Napoleon laid it down as a military 
 maxim that the army that remains in its intrenchments is already beaten. And 
 it ought to be. It is the army that attacks that wins. When the Japanese 
 stood before Port Arthur after tens of thousands of them had been mowed 
 down, they sent word back to the Emperor that the thing was impossible, and 
 the Emperor sent back word, "The Emperor expects you to accomplish the im- 
 possible"; and they did it. And God expects us to accomplish the absolutely 
 impossible; and he will find people after awhile who will trust him and do it. 
 Shall we be among these people? We may be. How many of you hope to live 
 to see the day when the world is evangelized, when every one, everywhere, has 
 a chance to be saved? I do. Why shouldn't we? You say, "Why that would 
 be a miracle." God wrought one over in the theater this afternoon when a 
 man found life and resurrection from the dead. 
 A voice : "Two." 
 
 Mr. White : That is all right, two miracles then. He is ready to perform 
 some more. He is the omnipotent God, and all he wants is channels through 
 which to let his power out. 
 
 There are three or four things we have all got to do if we are going to be the 
 best and do the best for him in this fight. They are all things that the Bible 
 emphasized. They are indicated there on that map, "Know, pray, go, pay." 
 If you keep those things in your hearts you will have a pretty good idea of the 
 cardinal Biblical obligations towards the world. "Know." Is there any Bible, 
 authority for that ? Look over in the fourth chapter of John, and hear Christ 
 saying, "Lift up your eyes, and look on the fields; for they are white, ali'eady 
 to harvest"- — dead ripe. You farmers know what a field is when it gets white 
 to harvest, what a white field is ; it is dead ripe then, and it has got to be cut 
 right away or it is going to be spoiled, and that is the way all the world now 
 is — dead ripe, over-ripe. You say there is no hvu-ry about it; no use of getting 
 excited about all this business; it has been going on for a long time. If your 
 people, your family, had been going on perishing for a long time, wovild it 
 lessen the importance of reaching the rest? I heard a minister preaching 
 over in the city of Washington a few weeks ago. He said he was going over 
 the Alleghany Mountains in one of the fast trains on one of the coldest winter 
 nights when the thermometer was away down below zero, rushing down the 
 mountain side at a terrific pace, when all at once the emergency brakes were 
 thrown on with such suddenness that every man plunged forward in his seat, 
 and they all understood that something unusual had happened when the train 
 was stopped so suddenly. Though the night was so cold, he got out with the 
 conductor to go forward to see what was the matter. The engineer and the 
 fireman were already down on the ground, and they went forward together, 
 only a few paces, until they came to the old night-watchman, with snow and 
 frost all over his whiskers, in the bitter cold night, on one dollar and sixty 
 cents a day, and he just held his lantern near by the rail where, as the previous 
 
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Union Biblical Seminary 
 
 train had passed over a sharp curve, the rail had snapped and was standing 
 away apart. The engineer, as he looked at it, said to the condvictor, "If we 
 had struck that curve at the rate we were going, it would have been moving 
 day for us all." And the old night-watchman, glancing back along the train 
 with two hundred and fifty precious lives on board, said, "Yes, and you never 
 would have known the curve was there if I had not got here fifteen minutes 
 ahead of time. I was afraid of this ciirve, and came with all spped that I 
 might get here ahead of the train." 
 
 My Christian friends, when hundreds of millions of our brother men are 
 rushing onward in fearful peril to their eternal doom, it matters, oh, it mat- 
 ters whether we get there only fifteen minutes ahead of time or twenty-five 
 years too late. It matters to Christ. Does it matter to you ? If we know, we 
 will surely want to do ; and the next thing God wants us to do is to pray. That 
 was the only thing in a way he said to do in that connection. He said the 
 harvest is very large and the laborers are very few; pray, therefore; and he 
 seemed to think that was enough ; and it is. If you will pray as Christ meant 
 you should pray, I will not ask you to do anj^thing else. Wliat happened 
 when those disciples began to pray that prayer? It wasn't very long until 
 they were all of them in the job themselves. It was their call. When they 
 began to pray people might occupy these fields, the Lord laid his hands upon 
 them and said, "Here, you are the very people;" and they went right out into 
 it. There is no use of your praying that kind of a prayer unless you are will- 
 ing to go into the field if God wants you to go; absokite nonsense to pray and 
 not be ready to do the thing that God suggests. It is not prayer, it is merely 
 saying words ; it is mockeiy ; it is hypocrisy. There is no need in your praying 
 that prayer and then when your fine college boy or girl of fifteen, or eighteen, 
 or twenty years of age, writes home saying, "Here, I find that there is a world 
 to save and I want to go out and help to teach them," you write back and 
 say, "Oh, no ; I have been praying that the Lord will send somebody else, but 
 not you." No use in praying while you have that kind of an attitude towards 
 your children going. Unless you are willing that your children shall go to 
 Africa or China, I tell you I would advise you not to pray the Lord of the 
 harvest to send out any workers. You can't do it with any reality. You can't 
 get anybody to go unless you are willing that God should send anybody he 
 wants to send. If we are going into this business at all, let us go into it hon- 
 estly. If we want God to send the workers, let us let him send those whom he 
 chooses. We have got five little children at our house, all born yonder in 
 India. I think we love them as much as you love your children. We love 
 them as much as we know how to love them; and our highest ambition for 
 them all is that when they come to matiirity they may be so in sympathy with 
 Christ that they will seek out the darkest part of the world they can find, 
 that they may there shine for Christ, and make some of the black v>'orld bright 
 with his presence. Is there anything better than that for our children to do ? 
 I don't know anything better than that for my children to do. I have a great 
 deal of sympathy with my friend Pitkin. Some of you college men knew him. 
 He used to be going around among the colleges talking to the students before 
 he went out to China. He and his beautiful young wife stopped in our home in 
 Calcutta, India for a week on their way to China. They went out and settled in 
 
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 Paotingfu, away in the north of the Chinese Empire. Mrs. Pitkin and her 
 little boy came back into this country three months before the Boxer rebel- 
 lion broke out, little dreaming of the baptism of blood through which the 
 Chinese church was to pass. When the Boxers gathered around my friend's 
 house, they prepared to cut off his head and mutilate his l)ody with their 
 spears. His head was carried off by them, and has never been recovered, and 
 never will be until the resurrection day. When he realized what was coming, 
 he turned to a Chinese native convert and said to him, "When this is all over, 
 I want you to send word to my wife in America that when our boy gets to be 
 twenty-five years of age, I want him to come out aod take my place." Would 
 you do that? . Woidd anything but the Spirit of Jesus Christ lead a man to 
 do that? But if you had seen China as Pitkin saw it, and what Christ could 
 do for China, as he saw it, and were in sympathy with Christ as he was, that 
 is exactly what you would do. 
 
 The mother of Henry Lyman, when she heard that her son had been slain 
 and devoured by cannibals in the South Seas, exclaimed as soon as she could 
 control herself to speak, "Oh, what can these poor people do without the 
 gospel of Jesus Christ? I thank God that he ever gave me such a son, and I 
 never desired so much as 1 do at this moment that some other one of my chil- 
 dren might devote his life to go out and preach the gospel to those savage men 
 who have slain Henry." 
 
 We were up in Monmouth College a few weeks ago, talking to the young 
 men and women about giving their lives to our mission work. One of them 
 arose in a meeting of students and said that he had decided some days before 
 to do it, and had written home to his mother, telling her his decision and ask- 
 ing for her consent ; that she had written back a letter all stained with tears, 
 saying, "Yes, you can go; but I never before realized what it must have cost 
 God to let an only son come to this world." This was an only son, and the 
 mother was coming pretty closely into sympathy w-ith God. But you people 
 who have only one child, remember that God had only one Son, and he sent 
 him; and where would you and I be if he had not come? 
 
 There is an old black woman up in Cleveland who was born as a slave, and 
 who can't read a word, and who hasn't a penny that she doesn't earn over a 
 wash-tub. She can't give much to missions, can she? She actually gives fifty 
 dollars a year. Her pastor told me about her. Fifty dollars a year from an 
 ex-slave who can't read a word, and who hasn't a penny that she doesn't earn 
 over a wash-tub! Her pastor went to her a while ago and said to her, "Why, 
 yoy are giving too much. How can you give so much as this?" "Why," she 
 said, "this is the very joy of my life. I can't give any less. It is what I get 
 satisfaction out of in all the hard work I have got to do. Why, very often," 
 she said, "when I am at work over a wash-tub, and the drops of sweat are fall- 
 ing down off my brow into the soap-suds below me, these sweat drops suggest 
 to me the jewels I am laying up in the presence of Jesus by this humble serv- 
 ice that I am able to render." This old black wopian, with her joyful sacrifice 
 never thought of it as sacrifice. She was able to carry the knowledge of Jesus 
 Christ to about twenty-five of her black brothers and sisters every year with 
 her fifty dollars; for. every two dollars you invest in missions ought to carry 
 the gospel to another human soul somewhere who otherwise never will hear 
 of it. 
 
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 I tell ;you it is a pretty serious thing to throw two clollars away on something 
 that is unnecessary, when the investment of it in the redemption of men will 
 carry it to another soul. It is a pretty serious thing. We can evangelize the 
 world at that rate. Is that too much? Wlien Ve went to war -with 
 the Soiith, what did it cost to set the slaves free? Twelve hundred dollars 
 for every man, woman, and child that was set free; and one Northern soldier 
 poured out his heart's blood for every eighteen that were set free. We are 
 only asking to-day for one soldier of Jesus Christ for every twenty-five thou- 
 sand of the bond slaves of sin; and we are only asking for two dollars to set 
 every man free, or give him a chance to be set free; and yet some of you say 
 it is entirely too expensive, and we can't undertake it. Would it be too expen- 
 sive if you were in the other man's place, and if he had your power to help? 
 "Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them." 
 
 A few years ago a boat was lost off the northwest coast of Ireland, in one of 
 the dreadful storms that beset that coast. Instantly a life-boat was put out 
 tor their recovery, with a brave crew of Irish sailors. They reached the wreck 
 and gathered up one after another into the life-boat from the waveg, and they 
 thought they had them all, when they saw one man away off on a broken piece 
 of the vessel, and said, "There is another man we must get." With one glance 
 at the already overladen boat, the experienced sailors said, "No, we have got too 
 heavy a load already; we will lose the whole crowd if we go out to sea in this 
 way. We must go out to the shore and come again for this man." They got 
 safely to the shore and turned again to face that sea, but the waves had so 
 risen in their fury since they started out the first time, that even those brave 
 Irishmen were afraid to venture upon it. They said, "It is simply madness 
 to go out on a sea like that; it means simply suicide for us all; we must leave 
 that man to the mercy of God, and seek shelter for ourselves." When they 
 started to seek shelter, one young fellow stood firm ; and as they stopped to see 
 what he meant, they heard hin\ say qiiietly but firmly, "If anybody will go 
 with me to help with tliis boat, we will go and see what we can do, anyhow." 
 His old mother heard him say it, and, throwing her arms passionately around 
 his neck^ she besought him for her sake not to go. "You know very well how 
 your father was lost at sea," she said, "and how three years ago your brother 
 William went to sea and we have never seen him since; he has been lost, too; 
 and now if you go, my last and only son and my only svipport in my old age 
 and widowhood will be lost, and I will be left alone and helpless." If any- 
 thing could have moved his soul, it would have been that. What did he do ? 
 He put her arms tenderly from his neck and kissed her good-by, and tried to 
 encourage her v.'ith the fact that God was in the storm as well as in the calm, 
 and if it were his will he would surely return, but if not he preferred to die 
 doing what he believed to be his duty. Another man volunteered, and they 
 started out on their perilous voyage. They were vers' soon lost sight of in 
 the mist and haze over the waves, but every eye was stretched in that direction 
 for the first glimpse of theij* return. Long and eagerly they watched, every 
 floating object on the water gripping their attention, until they Avere sure it 
 could not be the returning boat. Finally they saw the boat actually coming 
 back, but they were not yet able to discern whether the third man had been 
 found, and so they called out through a speaking trumpet to them the qvies- 
 
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 tion, "Have you found him?" And back over the storm the answer came, 
 "Yes, we have found him; and tell mother it is brother William that we have 
 saved." Our elder brother, the Savior of men, thought it worth while not only 
 to risk life, but to pour it out unto death that he might make us and forever 
 more call us his brethren ; and now to encourage us to risk something to save 
 the other man he says to vis — do we hear the voice to-night ? — "Inasmuch as ye 
 have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto 
 me." Can we do it for him? 
 
 Doctor funkhouser's Prayer. 
 
 God, our Heavenly Father, we look up to thee in great gratitude at this 
 hour for the gift of thy dear Son,^our Savior. We thank thee that thou didst 
 love the world, and didst so love us as to give thy Son. We thank thee, blessed 
 Christ, now at the right hand of the Father interceding in our behalf, we 
 thank thee that thou didst ever consent to come. We thank thee for thy birth. 
 We thank thee lor thy words, thy .works, and thy death, that we might have 
 everlasting life. Oh, what shall we render unto thee for all that thou hast 
 done for us? Thou didst give all of thyself. Can we do less? We have not 
 brought the whole offering. Lord. We have kept back part of the price. We 
 have professed to give thee all, and we confess to-night with sharne that we 
 have not brought our entire selves to thee. Forgive us. Lord; and may every 
 one of us to-night, in view of this amazing love, in view of the greatness of the 
 work which thou dost want done in the world, in view of the hundreds of mil- 
 lions of our brothers who have never heard of thee, may every one of us pledge 
 himself and herself that from this hour on we will give thee all. We will not 
 only give our money, bvit we will give ourselves first. We will bring our 
 bodies a living sacrifice. We will give our time, we will give our money, in 
 order that thy great pui"pose concerning this world may be wrought out, in 
 order that thy great purpose in our lives may be accomplished. O God, accept 
 our gratitude for this conference, for the very first meeting which brought to 
 us so forcibly the message of love, of service, of sacrifice. We thank thee for 
 that first service. We thank thee for Friday's service, under the leadership of 
 thy servant, showing us how we ought to give — ^pay over to thee at least the one- 
 tenth of our income to the carrying out of this great purpose. We thank thee 
 for yesterday's helpful services. We thank thee for this glorious Sabbath day, 
 bringing us up and out into a world-wide view of our responsibility. O God, 
 we stand condemned before thee, and we remember the greatness of the task 
 and how little we have done ; the greatness of the opportunity and how little 
 willingness we have showni. O over God, forgive us. We thank thee for the 
 message of the afternoon ; and now we thank thee for this helpful message to- 
 night. O Holy Spirit, take of the things of Christ and declare them unto us 
 through this earnest presentation of the truth. Do thou make our hearts, 
 every heart, as the good soil into which this seed shall fall and quicken and 
 bring forth a great harvest, not thirtyfold, Lord, not sixtyfold, but a hundred- 
 fold, to glorify thy great name. 
 
 We invoke the choicest of thy blessings, our Heavenly Father, upon thy 
 servant who was with ixs on Friday, in his ministry for his own fold to-night. 
 
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 Give him a great blessing. Upon thy servant whom thou, we believe, didst 
 send to us for these faithful presentations of thy truth, give him a great bless- 
 ing, enrich his heart more and more, and make him stjll a greater instrument 
 in thy hands in leading others. We thank thee for the great truths which he 
 has brought to us. They have humbled us, they have put us doAvn into the 
 dust; but we thank thee for these truths. 
 
 Now, give us all thy blessing and send us out to carry out in our lives these 
 things which we have heard these days, and bring us at last to see thee face to 
 face, with some sheaves. Lord, for the great garner at last. Amen. 
 
 Mr. White: Ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come 
 upon you : and shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea, and in 
 Samaria, and unto the uttermost parts of the earth. Now, if we are going to 
 surrender all to Christ and let the Spirit of God fill our lives, that is what we 
 are going to do. How far are we ready to let him use us in doing these things 
 as we go out from this conference? I wish we might hear from a great many 
 of your people who have been present at these meetings about their attitude 
 to Christ's great world-purpose. There isn't anything that counts like the 
 thing a man is. There is no use in his talking to people about doing some- 
 thing that he isn't doing himself. It is wasted breath. There isn't any appeal 
 like the appeal of life. Some one says, "What you are speaks so loud that I 
 can't hear what you say." That is always true. It is the thing a man is that 
 tells. Now, I wonder how far we are going just to put ourselves into identifi- 
 cation with Christ to have his puipose fulfilled. We have not time for 
 speeches, but we do have time to hear men, and women, too, if you care to,— 
 gather up into a single sentence the great life purpose which God has given 
 them. You may not necessarily have been here at this conference, but what 
 is your controlling life purpose ? What do you want it to be ? and your words 
 may very greatly help a whole lot of the rest who are just trying to decide 
 what our commanding life purpose should be. Now, without waiting one for 
 the other, let the Spirit of God suggest to you what to say, and then say it. 
 Don't disappoint him; don't disobey him; let him have his way. Turn around, 
 so all the audience can hear, and speak out quite plainly. There are a whole 
 lot of you people who could have talked better than those who have been doing 
 it, who have been sitting here all these days. We want to give you a little 
 chance in these last closing moments just to gather up the greatest burden of 
 your life in the form of a purpose. 
 
 In response to this request, an after-meeting of one hour was held, during 
 which scores of persons testified to the blessings that .had come to them 
 through the meeting, and experiences of their past lives and promises for the 
 future lives were given. 
 
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Bible Conference Addresses 
 
 Sl^ontiap ^^otnins. 
 
 Monday, May 7, 1906. 
 On Monday morning, at 10:00 o'clock, J. Campbell White addressed the 
 Dayton Ministerial -Association at the regular meeting in the Y. M. C. A. 
 building, as follows: 
 
 Address of J. Campbell White. 
 
 ■I greatly appreciate the privilege of speaking to this representative audience 
 of leaders in this city, and representatives also from a wide section of the 
 whole country. I didn't suppose it was going to be so large and important a 
 meeting, and have not got all the manuscript of my address in my pocket that 
 I may refer to in case I happen to forget, but out of the fullness of my heart 
 I want to say two or three things to you along the line of my deepest convic- 
 tion of what the church ought to attempt seriously to do in our day. I am not 
 a sectarian of any kind. I hope for the day, and pray for it, when we shall 
 all be one in the fullest possible sense. I had the privilege, after leaving col- 
 lege, of going out among the colleges of this country and visiting for two 
 years among them, touching about one hundred and fifty of them at that time 
 of all denominations, and it struck out of my life the narrowness that had 
 been in it before, for I saw that, after all, there isn't so very much difference 
 between the denominations when you get down to the real fundamentals that 
 they all believe. The little things that separate us are fragmentary and inci- 
 dental and entirely subordinate when one really comes to look at them in their 
 right perspective. And then I went out for ten years to India, and worked 
 face to face with heathenism, side by side with Methodists and Baptists and 
 Presbyterians and all the other kinds, and we forget all of these little things 
 that keep us apart. If you could leave it to a vote of the foreign mission- 
 aries representing all of your bodies here to-day, whether or not we divide 
 any more and waste a whole lot of time and energy and money by these imnec- 
 essary divisions, I think you would get a pretty unanimous vote that we 
 should not work any more in that kind of way. The missionary enterprise is 
 uniting the church as possibly nothing else is, and it isn't any wonder, for 
 Christ prayed that "they all might be one, that the world might believe," and 
 the two things go together, and as we get a world view and a world purpose we 
 do come closer together and the little things that divide us sink out of sight. 
 I believe the more fully we throw ourselves into an associated effort to 
 win the world to Jesus Christ, the more we will feel these differences sink out 
 of sight and the more unity we will feel. Now, the more we act and plan 
 together and pray together and cooperate in bringing about such a result, the 
 better. On the foreign missionary field they have already done it. We have 
 
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 got to trust each other there to preach a full gospel, for no one denomination 
 is going to attempt to cover the foreign missionary field. When we get over 
 there we have a thousand millions of people. The Methodists are satisfied to 
 take fifty or sixty or one hundred millions and try to preach to them and let 
 some of the rest of us have a chance at the others, and the Baptists, even with 
 all the things they believe so strongly, are quite satisfied to take a little bunch 
 of forty or fifty millions and leave the rest of us have a chance at somebody 
 else, and we trust each other to preach to those people a gospel tliat is ade- 
 quate,' that will do the business, and if we could only divide up our own coun- 
 try in some such sensible way and leave a denomination to occupy and work a 
 field, how much we coiald save to piit out into some other field where nobody 
 is at work. I do hope more and more that spirit is going to prevail, and we 
 are not going to multiply agencies in fields where there isn't room for them to 
 become strong enough not only to be self-supporting, but powerfully mission- 
 ary. A field that isn't large enough for a church to grow up in j'.nd become 
 self-svipporting and take an interest in the world enterprises for Jesus Christ, 
 is doomed to narrowness forever. The only way any church can have the large 
 light it ought to have is for it to be big enough to support itself and to give a 
 whole lot of money and workers to the rest of the world, and we are getting a 
 debilitated Christianity, an emaciated Christianity in a lot of the towns of 
 this country by having a half dozen churches among five hundred ^>eople with 
 no hope of any of them ever getting strong enough to take a large lookoiit and 
 a large effort in the rest of the world. 
 
 Now, what I have said about not being a sectarian I want you to keep in 
 mind while I speak of two or three things in connection with our own United 
 Presbyterian Church, for there are three features that, so far as jny observa- 
 tion goes, are unique in that denomination, they having sprvmg up in the last 
 three years. All of them, I believe, are in line with the great purpose of Jesus 
 Christ to win the world, and I believe they may have some suggestive value to 
 the leaders of other churches, and I want you to imderstand that it is not in 
 any boastful or sectarian spirit that I am speaking, but merely by way of sug- 
 gestion of what I believe all our churches ought to face, consider, and under- 
 take in the name of God. 
 
 Three years ago last October our missionary force in India, away up in the 
 northwest corner of India, with five millions of people around them that they 
 were supposed to reach, and only fifty workers at the end of fifty years of work, 
 decided that it was an utterly impossible, impracticable task for them to reach 
 that five millions unless the home church would see that field with them in its 
 magnitude and would send to their help a far larger number of trained leaders 
 from this country. It was the first time in fifty years they ever had deliber- 
 ately looked around over their field with the great commission before them, 
 "Go ye into all this field and preach the gospel to eveiy one" of these five mil- 
 lions of people, and deliberately and prayerfully asked themselves on what 
 conditions they might come to do that thing. The first time in fifty years ! 
 It is very strange that missionaries can be face to face with a need like that 
 for a generation and more without trying to decide that question. But if you 
 were to write to your missionaries you would probably find that exactly the 
 same thing has been true of them. They have been appealing year after year 
 
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Bible Conference Addresses 
 
 for two or three workers to take up work right around them which is urgently 
 needed, and you have lieen saying to them, "No, we can't send you any more," 
 and they have never dared to give you an adequate statement of the need of 
 the whole field. Many of our mission boards, when they had got these appeals 
 even for three or four men have been so afraid to tell the truth of what 
 was needed that these appeals have gone into pigeonholes and have never got 
 to the ear of the church at all, and that is the reason why your missionaries 
 have never told you the whole truth. 
 
 But this group of people, iinder an inspiration that came to them, decided 
 that they would once for all tell the tnith about the needs of their field, and 
 after ten days of prayer and conference together with a specific looking over 
 the entire field, every man in every district getting up and saying what he 
 knew was absolutely necessary in that field if all those people were to be made 
 intelligent about the gospel message, they found simply by their own state- 
 ment of what was needed, the first time they had ever made it in each other's 
 presence, that they were going to need a three or fourfold increase of workers 
 in order to occupy and evangelize that field. So this little group of less than 
 fifty finally came to this conclusion : It is impossible for us under these condi- 
 tions to reach these people. At the present rate it will jirobably mean two or 
 three centuries before the church grows strong enough to reach the whole five 
 millions in this district. In the meanwhile several generations of men and 
 women will have died without Christ. Is that all he meant when he said, 
 "Preach the gospel to every creature" ? And they believed it was not all he 
 meant, and so they said, "We don't believe it is possible in our day to carry 
 the gospel to all these people and make it intelligent to them unless our home 
 church will send to our help enough workers to put one in every district of 
 twenty-five thousand heathen, either a man. or a woman in every district of 
 that size," and when they figured it up they found that it meant asking for 
 one hundred and eighty new workers. They had never asked for more than ten 
 in a single year before, and it was only by a tremendous stretch of faith that 
 they dared ask for ten. They generally asked for two or three or four, but 
 after all these days of prayer and thought, the conviction came over them with 
 such overwhelming force as to be irresistible that they must, to be true to Christ, 
 to be true to those five millions of people for whom they were responsible, to 
 be true to the home church that sent them out as its representatives, they must 
 tell the truth fearlessly, whatever happened; and they said to the home church: 
 "If you mean to obey Christ and preach the gospel to these people, it is our 
 solemn conviction that you must send us one hundred and eighty new work- 
 ers," and every worker on the field signed his name to the appeal and it came 
 home to the chiirch like an earthqiiake shock — one hundred and eighty workers 
 in one field when we have only got fifty there after fifty years, and other mis- 
 sion fields larger than that yet not heard from. And some of the people were 
 inclined to think that it was just bluft' and by-jilay, and criticised the mission- 
 aries for getting enthusiastic and fanatical, and three or four months later 
 our missionary association met in Egypt. Some of you know that the United 
 Presbyterian Church has practically the whole of Egyi^t in its charge to evan- 
 gelize, ten millions of people. The missionary association there went through 
 the same kind of process. They were inclined to criticise and abuse the Indian 
 
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 missionaries, saying, "Those fellows are getting a very undue advantage of us, 
 asking for so much, while there is no reason to think we will get anybody for 
 twenty-five years if they get so many." They had not looked over their field 
 and didn't know what was needed, but by the time the meeting came 
 around there were workers who saw the necessity of either saying something 
 about their field or keeping quiet about it. God pressed it upon them that 
 they must at least consider what Christ wanted done in Egypt, and one after 
 another they expressed themselves, spending a whole half day in gathering up 
 what was to be done in the different districts in that country, with the result 
 that they decided upon exactly the same thing that had been asked in India, 
 and headed their statement to the home church by saying: "We believe that 
 our brethren in India were right, and our knowledge of heathenism convinces 
 us that it is impossible in any of these countries to carry the gospel to all these 
 people unless the church will undertake it in something like that serious kind 
 of way, and we ask in Egypt for one worker to every twenty-five thousand, 
 which is two hundred and eighty more." 
 
 Well, that was a second eai-thqual<:e shock that lasted longer and went 
 deeper. But the church at home began to think there must be something in it, 
 and they began to study into it and preachers began to say to themselves, 
 "Supposing I had twenty-five thousand people right around me here, one- 
 fourth of whom are already Christians; wouldn't it be a pretty big chunl?, 
 even thovigh they all speak the English language and are all favorably in- 
 clined to Christianity if to any religion, and are here in a decent climate 
 v\'here I can work eleven or twelve months in a year?" And most of them 
 who were honest said that they wouldn't care to have a much bigger field than 
 that even here. And when you put it in heathen surroundings, with nine-tenths 
 of the people unable to read a word of any language, who must be reached, if 
 at all, by the living messenger in a hostile climate, where people are not favor- 
 ably disposed to Christianity but powerfully prejudiced against it, and in 
 many cases preferring to kill their children rather than have them come out 
 on the side of Christ, they began to see that when the missionaries undei'took 
 deliberately to be responsiWe for carrying the gospel to each of the twenty- 
 five thousand people of that kind, they were undertaking the most colossal 
 thing that ever men undertook in the name of God. And that impression has 
 been deepening through the years, and when the General Assembly, the highest 
 court of our church, met three or four months later, the whole church was very 
 anxious to know whether it would ttirn the whole thing down as impracti- 
 cable; but after the days of prayer and of persuasion following the reports, 
 the General Assembly without a dissenting voice said: "We must recognize 
 these appeals as the voice of God and we must adopt this as the ruling policy 
 of our church and undertake on our peril to obey Christ as we understand his 
 commission." I don't know whether any -other church in the world is com- 
 mitted officially to that kind of a program or not, but I wish they all were, 
 and I pray that the day may come speedily when all of them are. I think 
 a long step was taken toward it down at Nashville a couple of months ago 
 when the secretaries of .all the foreign mission boards in this country, after 
 considering this whole question for an hour or two, decided that they would 
 now for the first time in their history send out a question to all their 
 
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Bible Conference Addresses 
 
 representatives in all lands, saying, "TJnder what conditions do you believe, 
 with your experience, it will be possible actually to evangelize the people in 
 your field ?" and within a year we may hope to have the official statement of all 
 American missionaries over the world on that basis. I do not ask you to take 
 the judgment of our missionaries. I ask you when the statement comes of 
 your own workers, it may be weighed as it deserA'es to be weighed in the light 
 of God's truth and God's plan for this world, and do not put it into pigeon- 
 holes as an utterly impracticable and fanatical enterprise. I am hoping 
 that before many more months pass, all the churches in this country may de- 
 cide that when Christ said, "Go. preach the gospel to every creature," he 
 meant his people in every age to do it. Anything else, anything less, is trifling 
 with the great commission. Did he mean that it would be satisfactory to him 
 if we preached the gospel to a few people and then went on our way living for 
 our own pleasure and profit and glory, and let these few preach to the children 
 of a few more, and they preach to the great-grandchildren of a few more, and 
 in the meantime hundreds of millions of people die without any knowledge of 
 Jesus Christ? Is it conceivable that Jesus Christ meant that? There isn't 
 any intelligent interpretation of his great commission except the interpreta- 
 tion that literally undertakes to do what he said, and the church, has never 
 undertaken it yet, never yet in modem times at any rate, and that is the 
 great obligation with which we are face to face now — the question of whether 
 we have a God whom it is safe to attempt to obey. I believe that God knows 
 more about this world than I do, and that when he says a thing is to be done 
 and when he says he will stand by and see that it is done, that he tmderstands 
 the end from the beginning and is able to carry out his own plans; but he 
 cannot caiTy them out through people who are unwilling to be his partners 
 and channels in that enterprise, and the whole reason why the whole world 
 isn't to-day familiar with the gospel is because we have not dared to obey, and 
 underneath it all is unbelief in God. 
 
 The next step was to see whether it would be possible to find these workers. 
 We felt, naturally, that the colleges of the church were the places where we 
 might reasonably expect to find these five hundred new workers that were 
 wanted, and so a deliberate campaign was entered upon of going into these 
 colleges and lajdng these claims upon the students and asking them whether 
 they would be willing to surrender to Christ to go anywhere in the world, and 
 whether, in view of these providential circumstances, it wasn't plain that a 
 much larger proportion of them ought to give their lives to go out into parts 
 of the world that are not occupied. As the result of this effort there are to-day 
 in oiir colleges about 125 volunteers, out of the 560 new missionaries our 
 church needs. 
 
 The students are saying, "We are ready to do the thing," and all the college 
 presidents (we have got five of them) agree and have published statements 
 under their own names and signatures, saying, "We believe the colleges will 
 stand by this enterprise and furnish all these workers." 
 
 And last year our General Assembly went a step farther than it had gone 
 at first, and said : We believe not only that the church ought to carry out this 
 enterprise, but that it ought to try to do it within the next ten years in order 
 to get the gospel to the people who are now perishing so rapidly without this 
 
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Union Biblical Seminary 
 
 message, which is the only thing that can save men here or hereafter. And 
 so we need to raise up yoiuig men and women at the rate of at least fifty a 
 year for the next ten years for this enterprise, and we believe that we can do 
 it. While for twenty years before there had been only a general mission- 
 ary influence at work in our colleges, leading a few in each case to decide to 
 enter upon this kind of work, and the seminaries were saying that they were 
 being depleted, and the missionary boards were saying that they could not 
 find enough workers; when the appeal was denominationalized and a half 
 dozen of the representatives of our own church went out into the field for the 
 church, and said, "Our church needs you in this thing, and if you do not do it, 
 it will not be done," the result was that instead of having groups of four or five 
 or six in each college, we have groups of from twenty to forty in each college 
 now who are looking forward to giving their lives for leadership. It is trans- 
 foitning our educational policy, with the result that the chvirch is putting its 
 money into educational work as it never did before. In a single offering in one 
 of our churches a couple of weeks ago, eighty-seven thousand dollars were 
 given to one of our educational institutions. 
 
 The educational problem of all our churches will never be solved until we 
 begin seriously to raise up helpers to save the world, and when the church gets 
 the conviction that that is the business of our educational institutions, they 
 will give their treasures to these institutions for the training of men. And 
 the institutions don't deserve to have the money until, acting for Christian 
 churches, they undertake to do that thing. 
 
 Some people have been afraid that the foreign missionary work was going 
 to overshadow everything else, and we were not going to have ministers to look 
 after the home fields if all these people went abroad. Wliat has happened? 
 As we have gone into colleges to appeal to men to give their lives for this work, 
 many of the students who had been fighting the question of the ministry for 
 years, by their own confession surrendered to Jesus Christ and said, "Yes, if 
 the church is in the business to carry out the will of Christ, I am willing to go 
 into the ministry at home ; I don't feel the call to the foreign missionary field, 
 but I surrender to Jesus Christ for leadership here," and the seminaries are 
 fuller of men to-day than they have been in their history. Why? Because we 
 are undertaking to carry out the policy of Jesus Christ, and he is going to fill 
 all parts of the field because we are undertaking the whole business in his name. 
 Do you think you can solve one part of the problem of Jesus Christ, without 
 solving all parts of it? Yoii never can. You m.ay try to. You may set one 
 department of his kingdom over against another, and when people in one will 
 have nothing to do with those in another, God will say, "I will have 
 nothing to do with you until yon change." The only way we can have the 
 power of God in our work is that we attempt to carry out the policies of God 
 in this world. There isn't any conflict between home and foreign missions. 
 These home mission secretaries, and foreign mission secretaries, and educa- 
 tional secretaries, and church extension secretaries ought to get down on their 
 knees together day by day, saying, "Thy kingdom come," and let it come just 
 as fast everywhere as it can, and let God and the people imder God's direction 
 decide where it shall come first. Let them have all the facts, and then let the 
 work proceed as God develops it. He knows more about the whole thing than 
 
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Bible Conference Addresses 
 
 we do, but to hear men saying that there is danger of overloading the church 
 and destroying the home base when our Christians are giving an average of 
 three-fifths of a cent a week to the non-Christian world, is foolish riibbish. 
 I wonder what Christ must think of that kind of tallv, with twenty-five thou- 
 sand districts in this world (the paper this morning quoted me as saying 
 twenty-five! God pity some of these reporters), every one of them containing 
 twenty-five thousand individuals, every one of whom has as valuable a soul as 
 you have, without a worker in any of those twenty-five thousand districts. It 
 is no time for the secretary of any board to twaddle about too nmch money 
 being paid into foreign missions. If the Christian church in America gave an 
 average of one cent a week to this enterprise, it would be ten millions a year — 
 we give seven millions now. If they gave a postage stamp a week, it would be 
 twenty millions a year, three times what we give now. If they gave a street- 
 car fare a week, it would be fifty millions a year, seven times what we give 
 now. If they gave the equivalent of a dish of ice cream a week, it would be a 
 hundred millions a year. If they gave the equivalent' of one hour's work, not 
 yoiir work and mine, but the work of the Italians and Hungarians who cannot 
 speaJv our language and who don't know anything but to handle the pick and 
 shovel, but who get fifteen cents an hour, — if we gave the equivalent of one 
 hour's work of the most unskilled laborer in this country, we would give one 
 hundred and fifty millions a year. We give seven millions now, and a whole 
 lot of people are protesting in the church papers lest the church give too 
 mvich to foreign missions. God pity them. We give the equivalent of only 
 three minutes' work a week now for the redemption of the whole non- Christian 
 world, and we talk about surrendering all to Jesus Christ. The scorn of God 
 is upon meu who trifle in that liind of a ^vay with the great redemptive pur- 
 poses of Jesus Christ, who died to save the world. He did it at the cost of 
 his heart's blood. When you and I try it, we give him the equivalent of 
 three minutes a week. It is time that in dust and ashes the church should 
 confess her sins of unbelief and disobedience and ignorance, and begin to 
 undertake in the name of God to do his work. Our church is entirely per- 
 suaded that we are never going to get the money we need for this enterprise 
 by taking an annual collection, even if the bishop comes around and makes a 
 great hurrah speech and tries to get the people to give. That isn't the way to 
 finance the kingdom of God. There isn't any Biblical authority for that kind 
 of way of going about his enterprises. Paul said, "Upon the first day of the 
 week let every one of you," not just the heads of families, "let every one of you 
 lay by him in store, as God hath, prospered him," and if it is important every 
 week to take an offering for the support of the pastor who preaches to Chris- 
 tian people for the most part, isn't it equally important, I pray you, to take 
 an offering every week for the work on which the destiny of the world hinges ? 
 What colossal selfishness and natural meanness would ever have suggested 
 taking an annual collection for missions and a weekly offering for ourselves? 
 It would be laughable if it were not so terrible. They want to think about it 
 once a year without much warning, and reach into their pockets hurriedly 
 and give the smallest coin and have done with it for twelve months. In that 
 spirit it will be centuries yet before Christ's commission is obeyed. 
 
 But when you show men, business men, that money will make a man 
 
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Union Biblical Seminary 
 
 omnipresent and almost omnipotent in helping his brother men up to the only 
 worthy life, they will feel under eternal obligation to you for showing them 
 how to live a large life, and when you show them that for fifteen cents a week 
 they can evangelize four heathen in a year, or one hundred and twenty-eight 
 in a generation, and they begin to do it, a new significance comes into the 
 daily toil of every one of the six days of the week, and there are many of 
 them who are willing to put a day's work a week into it, two dollars a week, 
 perhaps, and reach a man somewhere every week, and at the end of the year 
 fifty-two, and at the end of a generation 1,716. Isn't that worth while? Doc- 
 tor Goueher, of Baltimore, was telling awhile ago that he knew of a man 
 who put one hundred thousand dollars into one district in India in the last 
 twenty years, with the result to-day that there are fifty thousand con- 
 verts in that district who were twenty years ago idolaters. That two dollars 
 not only made the gospel intelligent to the man, but actually led him to an 
 open profession of faith in Jesus Christ. 
 
 We don't promise conversion. Don't misunderstand. We are not respon- 
 sible for conversion. God only can change a soul and breathe into it new life. 
 But your object and mine is to give that soul an intelligent knowledge of the 
 message of life, and we can do that in the United Presbyterian Church, and I 
 believe all the churches can do it at an average of two dollars for each, man in 
 these fields. Is it worth that to give a man a chance to be saved? What would 
 it be'worth to yon if you were in his place? And if you show men that by that 
 kind of weekly giving of their income to God they may share largely in the 
 work of transforming the world, they will thank you for it to the end of their 
 lives, as many of them are now doing, and are entering into the business of 
 saving the world as seriously as any missionary who goes to the front. There 
 are some people who are giving as much as thirty dollars a week in our own 
 church, reaching seven hundred and eighty people a year, or more than twenty- 
 five thousand in a generation. Wliy shouldn't you? Every life that is given 
 to missionary service is supposed to occupy one of those districts of twenty- 
 five thousand and be the means of evangelizing them._ If a man here at 
 home in comfortable surroundings can put money enough into the work 
 to reach twenty-five thousand, is that a larger offering than the laying down 
 of the life that is necessary ? Why, I say to you that I think it is a great deal 
 smaller offering. I believe it is a gTeat deal harder to give the life than it is 
 to give the money. I believe the cheapest thing we can give is money. I have 
 had men turn over to me a thousand dollars or five thousand dollars in a single 
 gift, and when I thanl?:ed them for it they said, "Oh, there is no special reason 
 for thanking; I really thank you for the opportunity. This doesn't take any 
 mutton chop out of my mouth or make any difference in my bani? account." 
 It doesn't cost them very much. Even those of us who can't give a thousand 
 dollars at a time, how many times have we had a smaller meal in order that 
 somebody else might have a taste of the Bread of Life? How large are our 
 sacrifices for Christ? I am glad the Salvation Army, that is represented here 
 this morning, has a week or a month of self-denial. There is only one thing 
 the matter with it. It is not long enough. Our Lord said, "If any man will be 
 my disciple, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me." 
 And if all our churches would follow Christ it would be a year of self-denial, 
 
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Bible Conference Addresses 
 
 and then another and then another until life ends, and every day we would 
 ask ourselves the question at least whether we can't give up something for 
 Jesus Christ, and most days we would find that we can, and there would come 
 into our hearts such a joy and victory in companionship with Jesus Christ in 
 his passion for the lost world as most of us have never dreamed was possible 
 in this world. 
 
 The third thing our church has seen the necessity for, if we are going to 
 solve this problem, is the rallying and enlisting and coordinating of the latent 
 forces among the men of the church that they may give their magnificent 
 energy to the greatest business enterprise in the world. We have seen the 
 absolute necessity of doing that, and have been studying for more than a 
 year to see how that third step could be taken, with the result that we had 
 over at Pittsburg in the middle of February a conference — a business men's 
 conference — lasting for three days, when a thousand men from all over this 
 country came together at their own expense to consider what men can do in 
 this enterprise, .and they formulated plans before they separated, and launched 
 definitely a men's movement looking in the direction, first of all, of setting 
 every man at work in his own community ; that is the place to work — where the 
 man is : set him at work, give him some healthy expression of the spiritual life 
 within. We tried for years to organize men's missionary societies on the same 
 basis that the women's are, but we found the men a much harder proposition 
 to deal with than the women are — not so unselfish, not so far-sighted, not 
 willing to go into that kind of enterprise except just small groups of some of 
 the best of them, and we decided that the whole thing would have to be shifted 
 around and the men would have to be at work just where they are, with a 
 real missionary spirit, with a real financial outlook, but nevertheless where 
 they could see the need, and we divided the church up into eleven departments, 
 which we have named, in a little booklet, of which I have samples enough to 
 give to most of yovi who may not have secured it at the conference the other 
 day. Eleven departments of service ! The whole church is divided and every 
 male member of the church is to be assigned to one of those departments ; not 
 a men's ckib for meeting to discuss the issues of the day and for a lecture on 
 some far-away North Pole subject occasionally, but a men's league for the 
 business of Jesus Christ in the community, to undertake all lines of church 
 work and put their manhood and their business experience into it. Their expe- 
 rience will help us very much. Their business training is just what is needed 
 in order to show us how to do a great many things in the church. 
 
 Now, I met here yesterday that man who got up in the theater meeting, from 
 Chicago, and he said that he had given one dollar out of one dollar and two 
 cents, and if we kept on with these meetings a little longer we would get the 
 last two cents. He told me he was the adertising agent for Eand & McNally. 
 I told him he was just the kind of man we needed in church enterprises to 
 advertise her work. We have not advertised the way business enterprises have. 
 Why, if the church knew as much about the missionary cause as it knows 
 about Pears' Soap, how many hundreds of millions would be put into the 
 enterprises in a single year. What we want is business sense and ability like 
 the business men of our churches put in their daily work, harnessed up to the 
 great business enterprise of the kingdom of God, and we can get it. I have 
 
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Union Biblical Seminary 
 
 not met a group of men anywhere in this country, laymen I mean, who have 
 not at once responded to that kind of appeal and said, "Yes, I have been keep- 
 ing a seat warm and giving a collection long enough; give me something to 
 do." It is a divine principle. Paul said, "We seek not yours, but you." Is 
 that the way we go after a man, or do we generally say, "We want yours, and 
 care mighty little about you?" That is the impression a whole lot of men 
 have got, that we chiefly want them to fill space in the church and give their 
 offering. Three men out of four who join our churches are never definitely 
 approached and assigned a definite task in which they can cooperate and build 
 up the kingdom of God. I don't believe that is too strong a statement, and 
 how can we expect that the men are going to give their energy to us if we 
 don't ask them to? We are come to the day when we must plan the work 
 of the church with all the care and sense, sanctified sense, that a great depart- 
 ment store plans its work, and use every available resource to get that work 
 done, of course, assigning every jnan to the place where he can do his largest 
 and best work, and by doing it he will rise as every energetic man rises in 
 every business, to the top, and we have got a rising church all the time, and a 
 gathering church, instead of men sloughing off by the thousands all the time 
 because they have got nothing to do and the thing doesn't appeal to their man- 
 hood. There isn't anything that calls them out the way the war cry calls out 
 the soldier. Men are willing to be enlisted and used if we will appeal to their 
 manhood. One reason why the proportion of women is so much greater in 
 the church than of men is because we have not given men a man's work to do 
 in connection with the church. I haven't time to go into the details of the 
 plans of organization. They are doubtless very imperfect, very immature. 
 The telegraph and telephone were not perfect after a year of experiment, but 
 they are getting more perfect all the time, and when we give ourselves to the 
 task of creating a machine by which men may be used, we are going to make 
 progress. We are making it very rapidly. Why shouldn't all the churches 
 join in enlisting the six or seveu millions of men who are members of our 
 Protestant churches in America in the greatest forward movement for the eon- 
 quest of the world that history has known? 
 
 For ten years I was in connection with the Young Men's Christian Associa- 
 tion, which is doing a power of good all over the world, but they have not a 
 great crowd of men who are doing it. I suppose it would be a very liberal 
 estimate to say that there are fifty thousand men in the Young Men's Chris- 
 tian Association all oyer the world who are really bearing the burden of it. I 
 suppose that would be a very liberal estimate of it, but look at what they are 
 doing. Suppose we could link up the seven millions of our Protestant male 
 church-members in this country; we would have an organization for effective 
 service that would be one hundred times as effective as the Young Men's 
 Christian Association, and I say it with all honor to the Association. They 
 have shown us some of the principles along which we are to develop men, and 
 they are the men in the church who have been doing it. What we want is to 
 call all our men out, and it is the only way to make a large man out of any- 
 body, to get him to express the life he has got. It is psychological that a 
 man's life will wither and dwindle if he doesn't express.it. I have seen many 
 a man in India who had held his right arm up in that way (erect) until it 
 
 108 
 
Bible Conference Addresses 
 
 grew in that position and shriveled up until it was nothing but skin and bone 
 for lack of expression of life. There are a great lot of Christians like that, 
 without much more vitality in them than a stick of wood, for lack of use. 
 How strong would that arm be if I didn't use it day after day? How strong 
 can a man's Christian life be if he doesn't give it exercise and use? Wliat 
 we want is to call men out to do the thing that they can do, not plunge them 
 all into the place to make a speech. We have better sense that that. Many 
 of them cannot do that, and the reason why there are so many dumb Chris- 
 tians in our prayer-meetings and our churches is because they have nothing 
 to talk about; they don't know anything of the line of goods we are handling. 
 You send these same men out on the road, as my friend Mr. Clark here is 
 day after day, and they will talk from St. Louis to San Francisco about sell- 
 ing their line of goods, and all the rest of the business, because they know 
 about it. You get them to doing something in the Christian life, and they 
 will have something to talk about very suddenly — without trying, it will come 
 out. A man can't help talking about the thing he is doing, btit many of them 
 have too much manhood to tell ns in prayer-meeting that they are doing 
 things when they know they are not. It is only common honesty and decency 
 in them to keep quiet. .Set them at work and the church will hear their voices 
 in testimony. 
 
 Those are the three messages wliich T came to bring this morning, the mes- 
 sages of our denomination, if we have any messages. It is true that we sing 
 the Psalms, and on their merits we believe they are the most inspiring as well 
 as the most inspired songs of the ages, but we believe the characteristic of our 
 denomination in history is going to be a spirit of loyal obedience to the great 
 commanding purpose of Jesus Christ and an attempt to align all the forces of 
 the church in the accomplishment of the will of God, arid I don't know of any 
 other purpose or characteristic of the church that it will be better for any of 
 our denominations to have when we meet him face to face. 
 
 "I said. Let me walk in the field; 
 He said, Nay, walk in the town. 
 I said. There are no flowers there: 
 He said, No flowers, but a crown. 
 
 "I said. But the skies are black, 
 
 There is nothing but noise and din; 
 Bvit he w^ept as he sent me back. 
 There is more, he said, there is sin. 
 
 "I said. But the air is thick, 
 
 And fogs are veiling the sun; 
 He answered, Yet souls are sick. 
 And so.uls.in the dark undone. 
 
 "I said, I shall miss the light. 
 
 And friends will miss me, they say: 
 He answered me. Choose to-night. 
 If I am to miss you, or they. 
 
 109 
 
Union Biblical Seminary 
 
 "I pleaded for time to be given; 
 He said, Is it hard to decide? 
 It will not seem hard in heaven 
 
 To have followed the steps of your guide. 
 
 "I cast one look at the field. 
 Then set my face to the town. 
 He said. My child, do you yield? 
 
 Will you leave the flowers for the crown? 
 
 "Then into his hand went mine. 
 And into my heart came he. 
 And I wjlk in a light divine. 
 The path I had feared to see." 
 
 110 
 
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