For Thine is the glory of love,
And Thine the tender power,
Touching the barren heart
To leaf and flower,
Till not the lilies alone,
Beneath thy gentle feet,
But human lives for Thee
Grow white and sweet.
And Thine shall the Kingdom be,
Thou Lord of Love and Pain,
Conqueror over death
By being slain.
And we, with lives like Thine,
Shall cry in the great day when
Thou comest to claim Thine own,
"All hail! Amen."
—W.J. Dawson.
* * * * *
"Thy kingdom come—Thy will be done on earth."
Fundamental in all projects for the upbuilding of a worldly or a spiritual kingdom, or an individual character, lies the ideal. Action, growth, conduct, spring from the creating ideal and in the process of development they advance and enlarge together.
"The ideal is the primary moving power in the human spirit," Professor Gidding says; "into his ideal enter man's estimate of the past and his forecast of the future—his scientific analysis and his poetic feeling, his soberest judgment and his religious aspiration."
Our ideal then for our country, for the work and place of Home Missions in it, for ourselves as Christian patriots and believers in Home Missions, is essentially a basic source of power. Into the ideal for our country must enter the inspiring conception of the nation which will include the background of its yesterday.
America means not only the cultural institutions, the multiplied industries, the vast wealth of farms (four crops in the year 1915 were valued at $4,770,000,000), mines and forests, but the genius of an Edison, a Burbank, a Goethals, a McDowell, the devotion of a John R. Mott, a Frank Higgins, a Jane Addams and the long honor roll of men and women made great through their service. America also embodies all that was wrought by those early comers who endured hunger, disease, suffering, that they might conquer a wilderness and make it a land of opportunity. It holds the fruits of service and sacrifice purchased by those later ones who willingly faced death "that government for the people and by the people" might replace tyranny and oppression, and the imperishable glory of those others who counted not their lives dear but laid them down that sweet freedom might be the right of every man, of whatever race or color. Beside all these stood the strong, true women who suffered, endured and triumphed with them.
The rich heritage bestowed by a Washington, a Lincoln, a Lee, a John Eliot, a Charles Sumner, a Marcus Whitman, a Sheldon Jackson, a Harriet Beecher Stowe, a Frances Willard, and a host of others, constitutes the infinitely precious treasury of our national life.