If the spirit of Jesus characterizes the conference and if these principles should be accepted by all, the question of the limitation of armaments, speaking from the point of view of the United States, would be easy. It would be merely a question of proportion among small numbers. From the point of view of Japan, the question may well be asked whether the United States is willing to follow this same spirit. The reply to the question is to be found simply in the facing of the facts. Are the proposals of Secretary Hughes in this spirit? Has the United States attempted to seize unjustly or to oppress the native peoples in Cuba, in Porto Rico, in the Hawaiian Islands, in the Philippine Islands, in China, or elsewhere? The inefficient Cubans were given a start toward self-government, were set upon their feet industrially and were given the opportunity of self-determination as regards all matters in which they could not injure the rights or the welfare of others. Similar statements may be made with an equal degree of truth with reference to Porto Rico, the Hawaiian Islands, Philippine Islands, China. While doubtless many individual mistakes may have been made, the spirit of the administration in all these countries, by the universal testimony of those who know, including the Filipinos themselves, shows that the spirit has been in accord with the teachings of Jesus.
The Japanese claim they fear, and doubtless in many instances they sincerely do fear, that the United States is aggressively attempting to gain control of the Pacific. Any one conversant with the facts knows that it wishes simply the promotion of the welfare of the people concerned, including the welfare of its own citizens, by fair, peaceful, industrial methods, in accord with the spirit of self-determination of the peoples themselves just so rapidly as they are able to assume that power.
XI. Our Government in the Conference
What is the position that our government should take in the conference? While exercising all due courtesy and exhibiting every care possible for the feelings of those in attendance, it should still have the Christian courage to face the facts as they have been and as they are, and to insist upon it that all the nations present see those facts and, basing their actions upon those facts, adopt so far as possible the Christian methods that will promote the welfare of all the peoples of the Far East, including Japan, so far as these problems of the Conference are concerned. If this is done, it does not mean that Japan’s future or China’s future is endangered. It means that every militaristic policy must be abandoned, but that the industrial, social, and even political future of all the nations, including Japan, will be better secured than can be possible in any other way. It will mean that the welfare of the inhabitants of China, including Manchuria and Shantung, of Siberia and of the islands of the Pacific, will be promoted by encouraging in every way possible their industrial development, by protecting them if necessary by joint international influence against aggression from without, and so far as possible by encouraging within those countries policies which will secure order, peace, and the development of the individuals toward acquiring a capacity for self-government which they seem to have been attaining so far only to a most unsatisfactory degree.
Above all, the guiding spirit, with its clear-sightedness and rigid adherence to practical conditions as they are, should be the spirit of peace and righteousness.
THE BROSS LECTURES
The Bross Lectures are an outgrowth of a fund established in 1879 by the late William Bross, lieutenant-governor of Illinois from 1866 to 1870. Desiring some memorial of his son, Nathaniel Bross, who died in 1856, Mr. Bross entered into an agreement with the “Trustees of Lake Forest University,” whereby there was finally transferred to them the sum of forty thousand dollars, the income of which was to accumulate in perpetuity for successive periods of ten years, the accumulations of one decade to be spent in the following decade, for the purpose of stimulating the best books or treatises “on the connection, relation, and mutual bearing of any practical science, the history of our race, or the facts in any department of knowledge, with and upon the Christian Religion.” The object of the donor was to “call out the best efforts of the highest talent and the ripest scholarship of the world to illustrate from science, or from any department of knowledge, and to demonstrate the divine origin and the authority of the Christian Scriptures; and, further, to show how both science and revelation coincide and prove the existence, the providence, or any or all of the attributes of the only living and true God, ’infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in His being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.’”
The gift contemplated in the original agreement of 1879 was finally consummated in 1890. The first decade of the accumulation of interest having closed in 1900, the trustees of the Bross Fund began at this time to carry out the provisions of the deed of gift. It was determined to give the general title of “The Bross Library” to the series of the books purchased and published with the proceeds of the Bross Fund. In accordance with the express wish of the donor, that the “Evidences of Christianity” of his “very dear friend and teacher, Mark Hopkins, D.D.,” be purchased and “ever numbered and known as No. 1 of the series,” the trustees secured the copyright of this work, which has been republished in a presentation edition as Volume 1 of the Bross Library.
The trust agreement prescribed two methods by which the production of books and treatises of the nature contemplated by the donor was to be stimulated:
1. The trustees were empowered to offer one or more prizes during each decade, the competition for which was to be thrown open to “the scientific men, the Christian philosophers and historians of all nations.” In accordance with this provision, a prize of $6,000 was offered in 1902 for the best book fulfilling the conditions of the deed of the gift, the competing manuscripts to be presented on or before June 1, 1905. The prize was awarded to the Reverend James Orr, D.D., professor of apologetics and systematic theology in the United Free Church College, Glasgow, for his treatise on “The Problem of the Old Testament,” which was published in 1906 as Volume III of the Bross Library. The second decennial prize of $6,000 was awarded in 1915 to the Reverend Thomas James Thorburn, D.D., LL.D., Hastings, England, for his book entitled “The Mythical Interpretation of the Gospels,” which has been published as Volume VII of the Bross Library. The announcement of the conditions may be obtained from the president of Lake Forest College.