In our eagerness to make the most of life, we must never forget the paradox that we get by giving; that only he who loses his life shall indeed save it; that the door between ourselves and heaven can never remain open so long as a door between our fellow-men and ourselves remains shut. The real difference between men and churches is not so much the difference in the resources at their command as in the command of their resources. There is enough latent power in the world and in the church to-day to regenerate society, revolutionize government and evangelize the world in a single generation.

      Do good, do it freely, do it without much overconcern as to the reward, and it shall be bread found again. "Cast thy bread upon the waters, and it shall return unto thee after many days." Commit yourself to generous endeavors, to noble sympathy, to kindly actions, and it shall be gain, not loss. Commit yourself without asking the sordid question, "Will it pay?" "There is that scattereth and yet increaseth; and there is that withholdeth more than is meet, but it tendeth to poverty." "The liberal soul shall wax fat, and he that watereth shall be watered also himself." We should understand that giving is an investment; that a man [142] gets rich in this world, not by holding, but by investing.

      The church to-day is not suffering from poverty. The Protestant churches possess thirty billions of dollars in assets. They have nine hundred and thirty-six millions of dollars invested in church properties. They give seventy-five millions of dollars annually to the support of the home work, and yet but nine million dollars a year to world-wide evangelization. This is but a crumb cast on the waters. Our croaking of poverty is but the old serpent of selfishness. We need to understand that local work is not everything. We have become overloaded with baggage. We have become religious plutocrats, crawling in wealth and in wantonness, giving ourselves upon the Lord's Day to pyrotechnical displays, fine form and fine music, and little preachments of sweetness and love. Heathenism, one billion strong, lifts its horrid head above the profitless waste of our discussions, a challenge to our manhood. Moody says, "Many of us are crying out, 'Away, my leanness,' and rather it should be, 'Away, my laziness.'" We should realize the fact that the true Christian is a man in whom there are no geographical nor ethnographical boundaries. When Jesus Christ gave his great commission, he gave it to all the world; and when we fail here, we thwart the divine purpose and we thwart the divine plan.

      But the highest word, perhaps, on the reflex work of the missionary movement is that of our Master in the parable of the talents, where he says explicitly, "To him that hath shall be given, and from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath." We must use or lose, and we must go to the lost as churches, or else we must go to our death. The organism that ceases to grow, oscillates for a moment around a given point, and then harks back again to some outgrown form. It can be shown that missions has never taken 10 per cent, out of the world's pocketbook of that which it has placed there. It cost us two hundred thousand dollars to convert the Sandwich Islanders, and our annual trade amounts to from five to eight million dollars, with a net profit equal to all of the investment. It has been estimated that every missionary sent out from England to the South Sea Islanders has been worth to England ten thousand dollars a year. Missions do more to create trade than all the propaganda of statesmanship. Missions

E. M. WAITS.

do more to conserve peace than all of the ironclads and the diplomats. Create within the pagan heart the desire for the refinements, and he also wants the necessities of life. He asks us for our clothing, and then for our plows, and then for our locomotives, and by and by he will ask for our aeroplanes, our wireless and our automobiles.

      If we are to consider this reflex influence upon church life, we find how true is this principle. Let the church cease to save its own life, and let it give itself passionately to the love of the race, and then witness the result. Let your church join the living-link family, and then watch the growth and development of that church. It will broaden its horizon. It will deepen its spiritual life. It will stir life beneath the ribs of death. It will give form and definiteness to its activity. It will remove those activities from the plane of the abstract and place them in the plane of the concrete. The Christian Tabernacle in Ft. Worth found it easier to raise six hundred dollars for the support of Mrs. Garrett at Nanking, China, than we had formerly found it to be to raise sixty dollars for the heathen. We need form and definiteness in the work of the church. The best caloric for a cold and indifferent church is missions. The best dietary for a dyspeptic church is missions. The best tonic for a neuralgic and hysterical church is missions. The best solvent for church difficulties is missions. The one universal catholicon for the divided church is missions.

      Once again, missions have a reflex influence upon the life of the [143] individual. To be alone is opportunity; to remain alone is death. "He that watereth shall be watered." George Eliot, in a poem, "Stradivarius," puts into the mouth of the old violin-maker, "Had I withheld or slackened my hand, I would have robbed God." The sweetest music in the ear of God is that music produced by other-love. Man reaches his very highest in this life when his heart responds to that sobbing of the Lord Jesus Christ for a lost and ruined world.

      When the man goes into the workshop, he gets the immediate reward of his labor; but, in addition to this, he gets back a great, deep chest; he gets back great, corded muscles; because the iron of the plowshare has entered into his own veins. This is God's highway to power, that as we give out, so shall we receive.

[CCR 142-144]