The secular also is sacred; it can not evade nor eliminate God. In the fullness of time God's hand is plainly seen

I. J. CAHILL.

in things as they are. The course of events does somehow achieve God's will. Secular contributions to the evangelization of the world are as inevitable as they are unwitting. "The things that have happened unto me have fallen out rather unto the furtherance of the gospel." Who was it said that? Was it the imprisoned Paul of the first century, or the inventive Gutenberg of the fifteenth century, or the infidel, licentious Sultan of the twentieth century? Paul's new-found experience is the truth of all the centuries.

      It was the lust for conquest and not zeal for God that led forth the Roman legions. But they conquered the earth and established peace and provided the nick of time to usher in a universal religion.

      It was no attempt to glorify God that led the Jews abroad, but stern persecution; and in every city were synagogues and places of prayer and the knowledge of the one God--pulpits ready made and audiences ready assembled and instructed for the first heralds of the gospel.

      Roman soldiers and Jewish traders had their own petty plans and personal ambitions, but all the power of their achievements converged to the one point of speeding the gospel.

      Again, in the opening of our modern [132] era the trend of events converged with tremendous power to the furtherance of the gospel. The intellectual Renaissance and the mechanical printing-press were the secular instruments by which the Spirit of God created the atmosphere in which the dull ears of men would hear the timely voice of Martin Luther calling the church of God back to the word of God; and when the reformer had his new-old gospel of liberty and purity ready for the blessing of the world, the same Spirit of God had made use of the new mariner's compass to give man the courage to conquer the high seas, and had already led Columbus to America's shores to provide a virgin soil for the planting of the renewed seed of truth.

      But those things were in the mystic and romantic past. What of our own time? Can the great God of our spirits use this businesslike generation in his ongoings?

      The pages of the very newspapers are, in spite of themselves, a daily revelation of the doings of God. The busy, unthinking happenings of the workaday world further the gospel. The kingdom is coming. It is the only thing worth while that is happening in this teeming age.

      The inventions of man have brought us a new earth. Railroads and steamboats, telephone and telegraph, printing-press and linotype, the weaver's loom and sewing-machine, and all that wide range of machine work that has displaced hand-work and delivered the race of men from bondage to the flesh and released them to the higher life of the mind, have broken up old methods of life, and made the world all new.

      The transformation wrought in our own land in the past century, with its marvel new every morning and fresh every evening, outran our apprehension. Still less do we appreciate the sacred ministry of invention to the dark places of earth.

      Benighted Africa has fourteen thousand miles of railroad to-day. Steam transportation will soon be provided for twenty-five hundred miles up the Congo, and the Cape to Cairo Railroad will be in operation in three years, the longest in the world.

      Since so much has been done in Africa, it will not occasion surprise that invention has done even more for Asia. She has forty-two thousand miles of railway, three times as much as Africa. China alone has over four thousand miles, and the amount is increasing rapidly. China has fourteen thousand miles of telegraph and twenty-five hundred post-offices.

      Travel and commerce are no less busy handmaids of the gospel. Trade calls for a condition of peace, and so promotes the friendship of nations. The interchange of commodities is almost universal, and binds the whole world together in the bonds of reciprocal service. The members of our church in Lu Cheo fu burn oil from the wells of members of our churches in western Pennsylvania. Our brethren in Bolenge wear goods woven by our brethren in England from cotton grown by our brethren in Mississippi.

      The Universal Postal Union is a servant of God. By its sacred ministry a missionary at Pak Hing Chan in South China sent to a Chicago mail-order house for a phonograph, by means of which the family and neighbors of the missionary could enjoy the rendering of Handel's "Largo" by the Theodore Thomas Orchestra, and be thrilled as Sousa's Band gave them "The Stars and Stripes Forever." And, marvel of marvels, the official of Tak Hing sent his private secretary with his wife and children to call on the missionary and his phonograph; and under its witching spell the secretary broke over the Chinese wall of custom and sat the afternoon in a room with women other than his own family! Thus do invention and commerce, supplemented by the Postal Union, combine with manly curiosity--and common sense--to the breaking down of the middle walls of partition.

      The world's breakfast-table lays the wide world tribute, and all nations feed every people. Tea, coffee, rice, tapioca, spices, sugar and fruits come from the ends of the earth to mingle in delicious fellowship upon our tables. In them China, Japan, India, Arabia, Brazil are bound together in one. The parlor levies on sixteen different countries for its piano alone.

      Thus is the whole world bound [133] together by the golden chain of commerce, that by the golden chain of prayer it may be bound about the feet of God.

      Invention and commerce illumine benighted nations, and so help to evangelize them. Chinese students who ride over railroads to schools of western learning can not be held to the worship of the dragon, who could not prevent the tearing up of the earth to build the road. Scientific knowledge of nature's processes drives out superstition, and makes way for the delight of tracing the ways of God in nature. Knowledge of bacteria is a sure antiseptic to the bacillus of witchcraft.

      Cuvier, the naturalist, is said to have been visited by a ghost with horns and hoofs that came to his bedside and muttered, "I'll eat you!" The great comparative anatomist quietly noted its construction and said: "Horns and hoofs! Humph! gramnivorous, never carnivorous. That beast feeds on grass and grain!" And so he turned over and went to sleep. Knowledge of things as they are is a splendid introduction to the knowledge of the God of things as they are.

      Illumination means aspiration. The rapid rise and victorious progress of Japan is known and talked of in Chinese tea-houses, in the bazaars of India; it could not be censored out of Persia and Turkey, and has roused even Arabia and the Soudan.

      Invention has dwarfed the world. We touch elbows to-day with the farthest man. The newspaper brings me the news of the fire in our Osaka, Japan, the same day it occurs, because the editor thinks I ought to know about my neighbors.

      The brotherhood of man is being forced upon us. Whatever may be our contempt for the lesser breeds without the law, cupidity will not allow even the unsanctified to disfellowship the yellow man's dollar, and our constitutional limitations absolutely decree us his brother in our splendid qualifications as a culture medium for his germs of cholera and plague and fever. If in stubbornness I will not learn from my Master the truth that the farthest man is my neighbor, be it so. Then God, by the sacred ministry of secular enterprise, will bring that faithful man to my side, and by commercial and sanitary self-interest force me to own him as a brother and to care how he fares. The world is dwarfed and the farthest man is my neighbor, whether or no.

      The world is dwarfed, and you who have cherished the hope of some day visiting heathenism in the raw, and feeling the thrill of being the first white man ever heard of by the gaping natives, will have to search long and travel far.

      There is a railroad, already old, from Joppa to Jerusalem. The king of Siam rides in an American automobile. There are electric cars in Tokyo, taxicabs in Peking, a telephone exchange in Canton, electric lights in Tientsin, twelve Chinese newspapers in Shanghai, municipal waterworks in Seoul, a telegraph line surveyed across the Sahara and one-third of it already in operation. You can not wire the chief of the village that you are coming, ride into town in a Pullman special, be whirled up to his residence in an automobile, and then expect to pose as the original white man! He already knows about you, and he knows something about your religion.

      If invention and trade have thus joined hands to further the gospel by making the world one neighborhood and flooding with light all its dark places and darkened minds, politics and diplomacy have rendered no less wonderful contribution to the same divine end. A single instance in American history suggests the volumes that might be written.

      The romantic purchase of Louisiana Territory is a perpetual contribution to the evangelization of the world. The romance of it is that it was made without instructions by an embassy of an administration that did not want the burden of useless and unwieldy territory. They were simply forced to it by the logic of events. Its contribution to evangelization is that it started us on a policy of expansion that, however unwilling, has step by step led us westward to the Rockies, to the Pacific, to Hawaii, to the Philippines, until America, that intended to avoid all foreign entanglements, is, in spite of herself, a foremost factor in shaping the destinies [134] of the new-born Orient. America, with her liberty that is Christian, with her diplomacy dominated by Christian honesty and unselfishness, could not hide from the Orient her Christian gospel if she would. And now you know why the Louisiana Purchase had to be made, even by the helpless envoys of an unwilling Government.

      And what shall I more say? For the time would fail me to tell of the religious significance of all the political and social movements of this pregnant age.

      Sad India has found hope, and tingles with a new sense of power. China is rousing from the sleep of ages, and the old regime is doomed. Tibet is open, Persia is in transition, Turkey is born again, and the beginning of the end has come to Islam.

      The mind grows dizzy with the sweep of events just now. It is only fifteen years since the war between China and Japan. Fast following that the Spanish-American war, the Boxer uprising, the establishment of western learning, the Russo-Japanese war, the perfection of the aeroplane, the Panama Canal enterprise, the political awakening in India, and the revolutions in Persia and Turkey, come with bewildering rapidity and divine significance.

      The converging of all these events in so short a time is as the focusing of all the light of heaven on our day, and blind indeed are the eyes that can not see in them the clear revealing of the eternal purpose of God.

      The net of history has been let down into the deeps of the world's distress, and by this concourse of events is even now filled with a bursting burden of gospel opportunity.

      The kingdom is coming. No power in heaven or on earth can thwart the eternal purpose of God. Neither life nor death, nor principalities nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor any other creature, can undo his work.

      Not the faithlessness of the chosen nation, for God is able of the very stones to raise up children to Abraham. Not the corruption and degeneracy of the rich and powerful Romans, for a white-skinned and stout-hearted people of the west are ready to subdue the earth and serve our God by the sturdy Anglo-Saxon integrity and spirit of service. Not the gross materialism of the free church of America--so mighty in power, so rich in purse, so blessed in leadership, so enlarged in vision--for if we fail him, God can use the redeemed opium devotee of China, the enlightened witch-doctor of Africa, the quickened, inspirited Hindu; He can subdue the Moslem and use him; He can reinstate the Jew and use him; He can lift up the Hottentot and use him. He can raise the dead, and his will shall be done.

      If man shall thread the earth with railways, it is that they may become highways for our King. If his steamships defy the storms of the mighty deep, they that go down to the sea in ships bear with every cargo the precious message of God's love. If by his cunning the telegraph has been set clicking round the world, it is the lightning accomplishing its Creator's purpose, tamed and docile in his hands. If he dares the marvel of wireless communication, it is but the whispering of God, of which the heavens have always been full for receiving hearts attuned to his. If his ambitions reach out and up to dizzy heights of self-aggrandizement, it all ends somehow in God's disposing. If he let loose all the diabolism of his perverted nature and stir up the terrible turbulence of war, the shock of battle and the upheaval of revolution with their devastation and death become in the magic of the divine alchemy but the blasting of a channel through the hard rock of materialism through which is to flow, unchecked and unpolluted, the water of life.

      All the momentum of history's progress, all the power of human achievements, all the significance of ambition's dreams, all the light of all the ways of God's self-revealing, converge to this one end of carrying to the ends of the earth and making known to the last man the supreme fact of the universe, that God's glory is his love, that his love is revealed in Christ, and that God is in Christ reconciling the world unto himself. [136]

[CCR 132-136]