Brethren, it is the call of the hour. These people may become, in my judgment, pre-eminently the missionary people. They have been called the Yankees of the Orient. They are scattered every whither, in every quarter of the world. I think it ought to shame us to have less enthusiasm for these for whom Christ died than they of the Romish church in the palmiest days of its missionary zeal. God help us that we may stand true upon the Pacific coast and all through our land, and that for every missionary church abroad there may be a score and a hundred. Dr. Williams said, after thirty years' knowledge of the Chinese, that we might evangelize China from one end of the empire to the other in half a century if we were in earnest. God help us that we may labor and pray for the coming of such a day.
Now I believe this: That, so far as the facts go, there is just as large a percentage of results to be shown for work among the Chinese as for work anywhere. Take it in our city, among some of the Chinese schools; take it in San Francisco, take it in China itself. I received on Saturday last a letter from Mr. Gray, of Hong-Kong, speaking of a young man who had gone out from our church as his assistant in the work there. Said he to me: "He is one of the most valuable helpers I could have. He not only stands fast by his work, but he also seems to have spiritual discernment to meet the peculiar difficulties we have to encounter, and there are plenty of them. Here is a man, for instance, who says he would whip his wife to death if he should hear of her accepting Christ. There is another, a mother, who would let her child starve if she thought it was being taught the gospel of Jesus Christ. But among this people there is no more successful laborer that I know of than Sui Chung." I knew him well. He came into our Chinese Sunday-school, which is held every Sunday afternoon. I remember him distinctly, as giving, so far as I could see, clear evidence of being born of the Spirit. And I bear testimony to these young men now in my church—there are ten or a dozen of them—that, so far as I know them and so far as I have been able to talk with them in imperfect English or through Chinese interpreters, their Christian experience is as satisfactory as that of any others. Nay, I will say more than that. I will venture to say that the Chinese brethren in my church are more earnest. They sustain a Chinese prayer-meeting regularly every Sunday of their own accord in their own language, and have kept it up ever since there were enough of them to be united together. I frequently look in and talk with them; and there is one thing about these Chinese that I greatly respect—I never saw them pull out their watches while I was speaking to them. I never saw any of them going to sleep; I never saw a look in the face of one of them which indicated that he was not profoundly interested. I was in their meeting last Sunday, and I told them about Sui Chung. Most of these Chinese can read. Some of them are very fluent talkers, and some are very intelligent. I suppose we have a thousand or fifteen hundred in this city, and a very large proportion of them, they tell me, can read the Chinese Bible.
Now, I have great respect for this people, if for nothing more than for their history. We have a petty hundred years of history. How many hundred have they? Any nation that can hold itself together for 4,000 years—or shall I say for more?—and that to-day constitutes nearly one-quarter of the population of the earth, certainly deserves our respect. Any people that can take our own handicrafts and beat us at them—and they will do it in a good many directions, and make money, even though you may disapprove of their way of living—deserve our respect. Any people that can furnish diplomates fitted to stand side by side with Bismarck and Gladstone, and our own embassadors say that they can, certainly deserve our respect.
One thing more they desire of the Christian church, if it were only a debt to be paid. I insist upon it, brethren, that at least Christian England and Christian America ought to pay back to them in missionary moneys at least an amount equal to that of which we have robbed them by the infamous opium traffic, and to-day it is people from Christian lands, more than anything else, who are furnishing the difficulties in the way of the introduction of the gospel abroad.
ADDRESS OF PRESIDENT ALBERT SALISBURY.
There are values even in this world for which we have no expression, for which we have no definite standard, and of which we have no very clear comprehension. They are values, none the less. But there is one standard of value of which I think it may be safely said the American people have come into a very clear comprehension, that is, of the weight of the working power of a dollar.
Most of us know it by pretty thorough experience. We know what a dollar costs, how hard it is to get, how hard it is to keep, how little we are liable to receive for it when it goes. And, let me say it, I believe there are no people on this Western Continent who have any more exact, definite, clearly defined comprehension of what a dollar is, what it will do, and what it will not do, than the managers of our missionary enterprises.
Then, it is sometimes thought and sometimes said that these men who conduct church work and missionary work do not know much about dollars; that a dollar, a thousand dollars, or a million dollars, is a very indefinite thing; and that they ask for a million dollars, or half a million dollars, with a great deal of nonchalance, as if it were merely a matter of asking. It is not so. When this Finance Committee indorse the recommendation of the National Council that half a million of dollars be raised for the work of this Association during the coming year, they do it from a business point of view, and when the officers and managers of this Association second this demand, they know what it means. They know better than anybody else in the world knows how hard it is to get half a million of dollars. For some years I went up and down through the South and West in the service of this Association. I went in and out of the rooms at No. 56 Reade Street, New York, and I must have been very dull not to know pretty well the inside workings of this Association. I have been among workers on the field. I know how closely everything is reckoned, how carefully every penny is spent; and I know how the demands of the work and the needs press upon the workers in the field, so that they look back to those rooms in New York with the feeling that somehow there is not a very great deal of liberality there, that those officers pare very closely. But these workers in the field have no such experience after all as the officers there at the centre of things. Those members of the Executive Committee, those Secretaries and the Treasurer, sitting there together, and facing the demands of the old work and the new, have rolled upon them every day a sense of the value of money and of the need of economy such as even the workers in the field can not comprehend. I have been there, I am now outside, and I am free to say whatever I please; and I make bold to say to you here that the work which is alive and growing must have the most money. Increased demands must cost. It is a law of nature. Now, then, when this Finance Committee come forward to indorse this recommendation that $500,000 instead of $375,000 be raised for the coming year, they do not at all reach the measure of the need.