We have helped China by being a good neighbor to the Chinese who lived among us.
A few weeks ago a Russian school-teacher attended a preaching service in my church. After the Russian pastor had finished preaching the school-teacher sought him out and said: “I had fifty young men in my class in the Russian village where I taught. I told these scholars all I knew about God but I could not tell them much, I knew so little myself. I determined to know more so I visited the most celebrated monasteries in Russia in order to find out about God, but I didn’t find God in the monasteries. At the great monastery of Kieff after talking for hours with the abbot he said, ‘You are too good a man to come in here. Go back into the world, and somewhere there you will find God.’ I found him this morning as I listened to the sermon. Now I shall go back to Russia and tell the men of my village of the God who now speaks to my heart.”
We shall help the Russian Empire by being a good neighbor to these subjects of the Czar.
America is to-day the greatest mission field on earth. It is not this because of the vast number of foreigners who remain and make it their home; it is such because of the vast human river that flows back to its source. In a barren desert tract in the West, where sage brush and cactus are the only vegetation, the desert blossoms when the rivers of irrigation are let in. So does this returning human flood bring hope and new life to wornout and often hopeless civilizations.
Here lie the responsibility and privilege of America. Through school and settlement and church and a myriad other institutions and influences we must make these Old World brothers and sisters feel that they have found in the New World more tender and loving neighbors than those they left behind; we must show them that accepting our science and education, our ways of farming, and mining and manufacturing, is not enough, although these have had much to do with our greatness. Queen Victoria when asked the source of England’s greatness, pointed to the Bible. It was a true answer. It is being humble followers of Christ that makes us fit leaders of these foreigners, and sends them back fit to be leaders in their turn.
If we are helpful, loving Christian neighbors to these immigrants we shall set in motion waves of Christian faith and hope and love that, like the tides, will sweep around the world and break in benediction on every Old World shore.