Hearst Fountain he Winning of the West CHARLES REYNOLDS BROWN The Winning of the West CHARLES REYNOLDS BROWN 1910 PROGRESS PRESS PRINT OAKLAND, CAL. *^^ The Winning of the West "On the west side shp,irie itie standard of e camp of Ephraim" -^-Num^er^ ;2 :18.'^; : HE Twelve Tribes of Israel took their names for the most part from the twelve sons of Jacob. But Ephraim was not a son; he was a grandson. He was the younger, the more vigorous and promising son of Joseph. He was the one on whom Jacob, the aged grandfather, laid his right hand when he was asked to bless the two boys. He gave his left hand to Mannasseh, the elder, who might naturally have been the privileged one. And in the estimate of the author of Genesis this action was prophetic. The Tribe of Ephraim became perhaps the most powerful tribe in early Israel. It was brave, resolute, enterprising. It pushed out to the north and west, thus extending the borders of the land of promise. On the west side shall be the standard of the Tribe of Ephraim ! Westward the spirit of progress and of lead- ership takes its even way. From Persia to Greece, where Alexander of Macedon wept be- cause there were no more worlds to conquer! Then from Greece to Italy, when the Roman Legions were victorious everywhere, and Caesar's name was supreme throughout the 679902 THE: WINNING OF THE: WEST then known world ! Then from Italy to Great Britain, to/ an; Empire ruled from the Thames ancL stretching from the rising of the sun to the gou:g down of it ! And now from Great to Greater Britain, to that larger body of in- fluence furnished by all the members of the English speaking race as it registers itself upon the life of the world ! Westward the spirit of progress and of lead- ership takes its steady way. Here in our own great west, in the widest stretch of contiguous territory occupied anywhere by this dominant race, the movement pauses for its final effort. There is no further west to which it may emi- grate. Yonder is the Orient, the east again! On the west side then shall be the standard of this influential tribe of Ephraim. Our own country has a magnificent oppor- tunity for influence. Its resources are vast and for the most part scarcely touched. Here in the United States surveyors have found twenty times as much coal as in all Europe put together stored up warmth and power and life. England must go three thousand miles for every boll of cotton she spins, while here cotton grows on the surface of the ground where the coal and iron are hidden which will spin it into cloth. Here are wide acres of ara- ble land. Take the single State of Texas and lay it upon the map of Europe ! The north THE WINNING OF THE WEST end of it would be in the mountains of Nor- way, the west side at London, the east side at Warsaw in Russia, and the southern end, hav- ing stretched down across Denmark, Germany and Austria, would rest upon Northern Italy and in the waters of the Mediterranean. And this is Texas alone ! Here is room for people to breathe and move and grow. In France there are one hundred and eighty people to the square mile ; in Ger- many, two hundred and eighteen; in England, four hundred and twenty-eight. In the United States, excluding the sparsely settled territory of Alaska, there are only eighteen. Here is room for a mighty race. If the United States were populated as thickly as England it would be supporting now in place of its eighty mil- lions more than eleven hundred millions of people. Here also is energy, enterprise, inventive ability. When they held the International Electrical Exposition at Paris a few years ago they offered five gold medals as capital prizes for th0 greatest inventions and discoveries. Five out of the five were brought to the United States by our own inventors. It was Charles Darwin, writing not as a promoter, but as a man of science, who said, "The wonderful progress of the United States is the result of natural selection. The more energetic, rest- THE: WINNING OF THE WEST less, courageous people from all parts of Europe have for ten or twelve generations emi- grated to that country and there have suc- ceeded best." This country is mighty now in the councils of the worl'd and mighty in the impress it makes upon unfolding history. What a giant it will be when all' these wide unutilized spaces are rilled up and its population no longer eighty millions but two hundred or five hun- dred millions of souls ! How vital, not only for the preservation of the Republic, but for the progress of the race, that these vigorous people should live under the influence of the highest principles and ideals there are ! And in the shaping of this history our own section here in the west, where the standards of| Ephraim are afloat, is to bear a most im- portant part. In the west the precious metals, gold, silver, and even copper, are stored and mined for the enrichment of the race. In the west scientific forestry and irrigation are working a change which will give the next generation an advantage like the one enjoyed by the generation now passing in the settle- ment of the Mississippi Valley. We are not content today to allow a few greedy men to skin the country for the hide and leave the carcass of it for those who come later. The conservation of forests and of soils is chang- THE: WINNING OF THE: ing all that. In the estimation of government experts thirty-seven per cent of what is now arid land may be reclaimed by irrigation for farming purposes and sixty per cent of it for grazing. What was once entered upon the map as "The Great American Desert" is now supporting a happy population and large sec- tions of it are selling for a hundred dollars an acre as farm land. What mighty possibilities also lie around this greatest sea! Only a man of prophetic mood who can see visions and dream dreams has any conception of the pages of history here to be unrolled. Look at the accomplish- ments which lie within the memory of people yet alive ! When the nineteenth century opened and for several decades after the lonely keels of a few whaling ships plowed their way through the Pacific, and that was all. This mighty sea and these shores and islands re- mained as in the days of Phoenicia and Tyre. One century has passed, and now look at it ! In that time the mighty commonwealth of Australia has come to be under the Southern Cross. New Zealand has come to be a leader among the nations in the spirit of prosperous democracy. The lovely Islands of Hawaii have become sources of wealth, of culture and of noble Christian service. Alaska has been yielding its rich returns. Japan has become 8 THE WINNING OF THE WEST awake and alive, taking her seat in the Par- liament of Man, in the federation of the world. China is stirring, and no one is brave enough to say how much that may mean picture the wants of China a century hence, when four hundred millions of people are hungering for the best comforts of earth ! Here on our own coast in that time three mighty States, Wash- ington, Oregon and California, have come to be influential factors in the nation and in the life of the world. And all this in less than a hundred years ! I have stood on the top of Mount Diablo and the vision which opened up was magnifi- cent. I looked to the east across the wide and fertile San Joaquin on to the point where I could see two hundred miles of snow r -capped Sierras, with their stores of beauty, of health and of mineral values. I looked to the south, where stretched the Santa Clara Valley, with its orchards and its gardens. I looked to the north, where grow the great forests of pine and of redwood. I looked to the west across this Bay and out through the Golden Gate upon that widest of all seas. And the thought of the history to be made here was like a fresh vision of God. When Napoleon's army was in the Valley of the Nile he drew it up in battle array and pointing to the Pyramids cried out, "Forty cen- WINNING OF THE: WEST turies 1'ook down upon you." From the top of this pyramid of opportunity we may look down upon forty centuries of significant history to be made around that sea. It is a vision to summon- into action the best in this race of ours, the best we have in this western world, where float the standards of Ephraim. The voice of God is calling "Be ready, for in such an hour as ye think not some new and weightier responsibility may be yours! Be ye therefore ready! Prepare ye the way of the Lord. Make His paths straight that His ad- vancing kingdom may walk therein with swift feet. Every valley shall be exalted, every mountain shall be brought low; the crooked made straight and the rough places plain, that all flesh may see the salvation of our God." It is for you, you who in the providence of God have come to this place of opportunity for such a time as this, to see to it that this eager, pulsating, influential stream of life here upon this coast is brought under the consecra- tion and leadership of Christian forces. When Abraham had the vision which formed our morning lesson, when he came to see that if he and his descendants enjoyed the blessing of righteousness other nations would be blessed in them, he set about his task with all serious- ness. He went here and there building altars to Jehovah, the God of Hosts. He would have 10 THE; WINNING OF THE: WEST men called to worship. He would have them brought face to face with the highest concep- tion of the Divine the race then enjoyed. He would have them nourished upon those truths which marched at the head of the moral prog- ress of that day, leading it on as by a pillar of cloud and of fire. And as we enjoy the same vision and hear the Divine Voice say, "I will bless thee and thou shalt be a blessing; I will 1 make thy name great and in thee shall all the nations of the earth be blessed" it is for us in turn to build our altars unto the living God in every mining town and lumber camp, in the neglected parts of the cities and in every spot of spiritual need that men and women may be led in the way of life eternal. We have a great responsibility here in this State, and every time the hands of the clock reach high noon our obligation is increased. The breaking up of the great wide ranches like the Glenn Ranch and others in the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys into smaller hold- ings means the multiplication of the popula- tion by ten and then by twenty and then by a hundred. Even now in the middle west, where land has become so dear as to be prohibitive to men of small means and large families, and in the) east and in Europe, many families have their goods packed up and are waiting for to- morrow to start to California. The develop- THE WINNING OF THE WEST 11 ment of electric power in unprecedented meas- ure in Northern California means new facilities for transportation, for manufacture, with all the attendant advantages. The opening of the Panama Canal will not only give us in effect a coast line stretching continuously from Eastport, Maine, to Seattle, it will mean the coming of ships direct from Europe, bringing immigrants to fill up these vast places with a busy and prosperous people. The voice of God is calling us to be ready to meet all that to be ready to receive that greater population and teach it, wash it in baptism and enroll it in the service of the Son of God ! We have a great responsibility, but many Christian people seem to be unaware of the obligation. There are Christians here from older sections of our country who have lost their church letters and their church habits and convictions on the way. They dropped them at Ogden or Winnemucca perhaps. In break- ing away from some of the conventions of the less plastic life of the east they also broke away from some of the principles of action. You could name any number of people who in Massachusetts, in Ohio, in Iow T a, were active and earnest Christians, but now in California they have caught the pleasure seeking, pleas- ure loving mood, and in place of helping to carry the burden they simply add their own 12 THE WINNING OF THE WEST weight to the responsibility already upon us. The extravagant way of living here causes many people to cast overboard any serious idea of responsibility for the Christian work of the state. There are those who never allow their right hands to know what their left hands are doing if they did their right hands would be so ashamed that more was not being done that they would hide themselves deep in the pockets of these individuals. There are Christian fam- ilies who spend more on the theater every year than they do to evangelize the w r orld. There are women who come to church wear- ing hats which cost twenty or thirty dollars and then give fifty cents or a dollar to Christ- ianize their own state. When we look at the disproportion in many homes between the amounts spent for luxury, pleasure, self-indul- gence and the amount spent to make strong the work of Christ in the state and to make easier the lot of the home missionary, we won- der if we are worthy to be called Christians. "Now we desire a better country" the apostle cried of old, "that is a heavenly." He was not thinking of death and the hereafter. He was not contrasting earth and sky; his mind was not on the geography of the situation at all. "Now we desire a better country that is a heavenly" a country with a rich soil under it and a cl'ear sky above it ; a country with splen- THE WINNING OF THE WEST 13 did material resources and with a heaven full of ideals and principles to preside over its fun- damental purposes ! Now we desire a better country, a country where men and women live daily under the empire of conscience, under the power t of divine grace, under the leader- ship of that Holy Spirit, who is sent to lead us into all' truth and into life eternal. We have gone into many of those neglected places in California and have built there our little places of worship with their tiny spires pointing upward. But a building is not a church ! When Jesus said "On this, I will build," He was not pointing to a building or to the foundation of a building. His eye was on a man, an energetic, warm-hearted, devoted, Christian man. In the battles of war it is the man behind the gun who decides the issue. And in the greater battl'es of peace it is the man behind the church who determines whether or not it will take a position of influence and leadership in the larger life of the community. If we could have sustained them more ade- quately we might have been sending into all these frontier communities, men of larger build, men with more complete equipment, men able to possess themselves of books and other aids to growth, in such a way as to make the whole Christian impress upon the life of our state more profound and helpful. 14 THE; WINNING OF THE WEST The responsibility for all this is upon us. Ten years ago the Congregational' people of this State voted to be no longer dependent upon the generosity of Massachusetts and Con- necticut and Ohio. They voted to be self- supporting and to become responsible for their own Christian work. During these years I have been President of the California Home Missionary Society. We correspond with these men in the field; we keep ourselves in touch with their work. Month after month we meet as directors and hear reports from our Superintendent, who travels among these struggling churches. And when I realize the difficulty and hardship of many of these fields, when I realize not only in the newspapers, but in my own bills, that the cost of living has ad- vanced from thirty to forty per cent, the ef- forts of these brave men and their brave wives to keep the torch of Christian influence lighted and shining in all these needy places, make an effective appeal to my heart-strings and to my purse-strings. We ought certainly to match the physical attractions of our State with a corresponding amount and quality of spiritual advantage. If we are ready to undertake this we shall find a generous measure of work cut out for us. The people of Southern California have adver- tised and boasted of their portion of the State THE WINNING OF THE WEST 15 until one might think that the real centers of interest all lay somewhere south of Tehachapi. But the truth is the things which make Cali- fornia great are here. Mount Shasta and Yo- semite Valley, Hetch Hetchy and the King's River Canyon, Lake Tahoe and the Big Trees, the Golden Gate and Lick Observatory on Mount Hamilton, the wide wheat fields, the great forests and the deep; mines, the Univer- sity of California and Stanford University, are all here in Northern California. And it is for us to match these abundant resources and op- portunities with a, ministry of Christian in- fluence that shall make our State all glorious within as well as without. We have by no means kept pace, and there is a necessity upon us for an enlargement of our faith, our service and our gifts. In a re- cent year, when it was ascertained from the religious census that the Protestant Church membership of the United States amounted to one-fifth of the population, here in Califor- nia it amounted to only one-twentieth. And while we have no hard words to say of our Christian friends who receive their ideals from Rome, we believe it is for the good of our country that there should be a much larger percentage of those who take the freer and more modern path of life. Our climate gives us length of life, but to estimate life in its 16 THE WINNING OF THE WEST true proportions one must multiply the length by the breadth and again by the height and the depth. We are called upon to give to the life of our State a greater breadth of interest and that height and depth of aspiration and purpose which comes through Christian faith, in order to confer upon it a finer symmetry and a larger measure of completeness. God has two hands, for we are made in many ways after His likeness and image. With one hand He has been preparing this place of priv- ilege, of opportunity, of possible influence upon the larger life of the race. He has been carry- ing to this spot vast amounts of that plastic clay which is ready to take an impress that will have an effect reaching on into the ages. And with His other hand He is ready to use the die that shall stamp upon it the features of the life of the Son of God. He is waiting for us to furnish Him the means, for He works uniformly through human instru- ments. Fill the great Hand of God anew with these better agencies of His holy purpose, with those well-trained and well-equipped men of consecration who shall go into all the needy places of this State to impress upon the life there the qualities they have gained through fellowship with the Savior of men. January 23rd, 1910. IITH BROST^ i | B ooir^ up ' - - ' Kodaks, stationery UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY This book is DUE o^the last date stamped below. Fine schedule: 25 cents at* &rt day c-nts Ofi i&urth day ovc One dollar on ;C JO 05 '93 LD 21-100m-12,'46(A2012sl6)4120 Gaylord Bros. Makers Syracuse, N. Y. PAT. JAN 21, 1908 U.C. BERKELEY LIBRARIE 6799Q2 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY