The Christian yields obedience to no external compulsion. The force that rules his life dwells within him, and he moves with gladness upon the pathway of loyalty to that Master whose love constrains him to the sacrificial life. The power of that divine love is released and set at work by the vision of the task the Master appoints. The larger and clearer the vision, the [203] swifter and surer the obedience. When the eyes of the heart are opened to see the hope of God's calling, and to see the mighty reserves of power accessible to Christian faith, the life can not tremble in the balance of indecision, but springs to deed. Vision first, then action: so is it in all spheres of human achievement.

      The heavenly vision is always missionary vision. It carries with it the word of command or of entreaty. It bids either "go" or "come." Neither arguments of logic nor hesitations of prudence are suffered to paralyze its force for those to whom it comes. All those who, through faith, subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, and from weakness were made strong,

C. M. SHARPE.

ran their race in the power of the heavenly vision. Paul traveled his victorious martyr course vision-led and vision-sped. Upon the Damascus way he saw the risen Lord, and heard the command to "go." At Troas the vision of a man of Macedonia there was, and the word was "Come." First the vision of divine resources of love and power to help and heal the lives of men. Next the vision of a needy humanity feeling after God.

      Our Macedonias lie all about us. Men of Carpathia, of Croatia, Italia, Hungaria and Slavonia have come to us, and by their inarticulate needs are beseeching our help. The great centers of population, with all the intensification they give to our great human problems, call to us and say, "Come over to Urbania and help us." The Southland, with its dusky millions and its stubborn race problem, cries for deliverance from passion and prejudice. It cries for light that it may walk in the path of justice and of honor unstained with the blood of the backward race upon its conscience, and uncontaminated by that blood within its veins.

      We lift up our eyes eastward and behold the swelling flood of immigration--millions of alien folk coming to unite themselves for weal or woe to our national destiny. Who are these, whence come they and what do they seek? They come to our shores either to escape political despotism or to improve their economic condition, in ignorance, all the while, that the religion they profess has sustained and consecrated the social order from whose ills they flee. Between their ethical and religious ideas and those of American democracy there is no point of contact. They must learn Americanism, if at all, through contact of life.

      Coming to us then, chiefly from economic or material motives, and separated from the religious and social forces which, whatever their character, have exercised control over them in their home land, to what will they gravitate here in this new home? Will they not most naturally swing into the mighty current of American industrialism, wherein the loaves and fishes are the chief considerations, and all the finer, more ideal goods of life are in danger of perishing? There is no question that the immigrant will be assimilated, but by whom and to what? Will he be assimilated to that sense of moral and spiritual mission which has made Anglo-Saxon America great in the past, and which alone can guarantee her future? What does America do for the immigrant? "Too often," says H. G. Wells, "America makes of the immigrant an infuriated toiler, tempts him with dollars, speeds him up with competition, hardens him, coarsens his manners, and, worst crime of all, forces him to sell his children into toil."

      What have the Disciples of Christ to contribute to the work of Americanizing and Christianizing these alien populations? What intelligent confidence may we have in the winsomeness of our glad tidings for these forty diverse nationalities? I answer: We have the gospel of union, through simple faith in Jesus Christ, without the trappings of a burdensome ecclesiasticism, and without the curse of priestly tyranny. We have a democratic type of Christianity that has grown up within the American republic to present to these peoples, sick of despotism, who have come to [204] dwell under the "starry ensign."

      Comes now another vision and another call--the vision and the call of the American city. Is the city the "Hope of Democracy," as one writer expresses it, or does the city constitute the great challenge and test of our institutions? It is certain that in the great centers of population practically all our vexing political and social problems present themselves in their most acute forms. Here is seen the economic or industrial struggle in all its fierceness and implacableness. Capital and labor confront each other in serried, bristling ranks. Pinching poverty contrasts with wasteful wealth, while disease and premature death stalk through the "crowded warrens of the poor." Here is the paradise of the political corruptionist; here the traffic in liquid damnation still holds its unshaken fortress; and over all goes crawling the slimy snake of the social evil. Moreover, it is in the city that the problem of the immigrant assumes its most stubborn form. Here the alien populations gather in vast colonies which are almost completely impervious to the better influences of the surrounding American environment, while singularly open to the inroads of those that are evil.

      The Disciples of Christ have no elements of religious truth for the solution of the problems of the city that are not the common possession of all evangelical religious bodies. They are numerically and financially weak in the cities. But they are a people ecclesiastically and ritually unencumbered. They have a buoyant optimism born of a great century of triumphant progress. They are not paralyzed by any belief in fate, even in the presence of conditions that seem fatal. They ought to be of all religious peoples facing the tasks of these times, the readiest to attack new problems, and they ought to have the courage to attack them in the way that most surely promises victory, whether they follow the track of precedent or no. Through the American Christian Missionary Society the Disciples of Christ ought to establish social settlement work in a dozen of our cities within the next five years. Our colleges ought to be sending their choicest young men into special training for social service. We ought to have scores of men studying the language and life of these foreign populations with a view to going among them as the missionary goes to foreign lands. It is time we used the lure of the heroic and the vast upon the young life of the church. That is the only motive that will fill the ranks of the ministry with the sort of men the work demands.

      But now mine eyes turn to the Southland, where lie so many of our American traditions of chivalry and romance. There rises before me the vision of two peoples in relations of mingled irony, of pathos and of tragedy. All the educational, moral and religious forces of the nation must work at this most stubborn of all the problems that confront our civilization.

      What are the solutions proposed? It is often said that three only are possible: deportation, assimilation or annihilation. Of these alternatives a prominent Southern statesman and thinker has said: "Neither presents a working hypothesis. Physical facts alone prevent deportation. Physical facts stressed by ineradicable race pride bar the way against assimilation. Physical facts, backed by our religion, our civilization, our very selves, forbid annihilation. We can not imitate Herod."

      What, then, is to be done? "Christ hath showed thee, O Southland, what is good, and what doth he require of thee but to do justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy God?" Justice and mercy in this case are not religion merely, and humanity. They are statesmanship and social wisdom. The white race is superior. Yes! and in no way may it more surely keep and increase that superiority than by uplifting the lower race. Amalgamation of blood is unthinkably repugnant. Yes! and in no way can that racial dishonor be more surely escaped than by teaching the inferior race self-respect, and by giving to it a vision of race mission and race achievement for itself. It is not enough that we should be merely spectators of the black man's struggles. "He is," as one has said, "a human-being under the Fatherhood of God and within the [205] brotherhood of man." We must then help him to rise, trusting the God that made and loves us both to see that no vital interest of our race shall suffer through our willingness to recognize the bond of brotherhood Jesus Christ His Son lived and died to create and to perpetuate.

      The vision of the world and its need rises vast and solemn behind the vision of America's need. Disobedience to the latter is for us disobedience to the former. No one who appreciates the magnitude of America's place and power in the life of the modern world can resist the conviction of her responsibility in deciding the moral and spiritual destiny of mankind for centuries and millenniums to come. The energy, inventiveness, restless enterprise and versatility of the Anglo-Saxon race inevitably must give to it foremost rank in the councils of nations. From the vantage-ground of this compact and wonderful American continent, with its exhaustless wealth of resources, and lying, as it does, in the zone of power, how can this greatest of all the races born of Time fail to influence decisively the direction of the world's life?

      Only Jesus Christ, the brother of every man, and the founder of the "Order of the Loving Heart," can guarantee a world civilization of brotherly men. To put Christ Jesus into the center of every American's affection, to make him the organizing force in every American institution, and introduce him as the ideal American citizen to every stranger that enters within our gates, is the aim of American Christianity in its home missionary endeavor. In this high aim, the American Christian Missionary Society aspires to have a worthy part. It sees the vision. It would leap with gladness to swift obedience were its feet not bound by poverty of means and were it not too much restrained by the blindness and hesitancy of its constituency. Let us who are gathered here upon this hill crest of vision become eyes for our brethren, and trumpet tongues to call them to their share of service in the building of the kingdom of God--"a fellowship of Christlike love which is to include every soul that is willing to enter! A community which embraces every other true community of men which contains and controls the home, the State, the economic system, the fellowship of science, letters, art. A holy society already in the midst of men, already shedding its brightness over human life, yet shining more and more unto the perfect day; a kingdom progressively realized on earth, perfectly fulfilled in heaven. A girdle of love, destined to clasp into unity the whole of mankind, whatever the race, the color, the culture, and to bind all to the throne and heart of the universal Father."

[CCR 203-206]