"Of the qualities that have coöperated to elevate them so rapidly to such a commanding position, the most impressive is a great, a tireless energy."
1. Our debt to the pioneers. The early history of American life has many wholesome chapters for modern men to read. The religious basis of the state was a much more evident and vital fact in the life of the founders of the Republic than of many modern leaders. Quotations from the early charters make it clear that there was a wonderful religious significance in their nation building. "This thing is of God," said the London Trading Company to the Pilgrim Fathers. "In the name of God, Amen," are the opening words of the Mayflower compact, and that document ends with these words, "For the glory of God and the advancement of the Christian faith." The early settlers of North and South Carolina declared themselves to be actuated by laudable zeal for the propagation of the gospel. America owes much to the character and vigor of the German and Scandinavian elements in her population as well as to those of English parentage. No land has had a higher grade of founders than has the United States.
Leroy Beaulieu says, in The United States in the Twentieth Century: "The Americans have been the product of a selection and of a double selection. Only the boldest, the most enterprising of men have the courage to traverse the sea for the purpose of carving out a new life in an unknown and distant land. Then, having arrived, only the most energetic, the wisest, and the most gifted in the spirit of organization succeed in a struggle which is more severe, more merciless to the feeble, in new countries than in old ones. Thus America, so to speak, has secured the cream of Old World society. That is why the human standard is higher there than in other countries."
2. Mechanical genius. In the world-wide propagation of the gospel the ability to master the forces of nature and so make modern progress possible has a place in the fitness of character displayed by American life. A large number of the modern labor-saving inventions have come from America as shown by the fact that in one of the great International Expositions five gold medals were offered for the greatest labor-saving inventions. When the awards were made, it was discovered that all of them were bestowed for inventions in the United States.
3. The public school. It is generally acknowledged that whatever may be the faults and imperfections of our intellectual life, the American public school has demonstrated to the world on a larger scale than ever before the possibility of the education of the masses. Japan was quick to see that this was one of the secrets of the power of Western nations. Nowhere is there a more marvelous example of an entire nation going to school than in recent years in Japan, where probably a larger percentage of children of school age are actually in school to-day than in any other country in the world. It is generally acknowledged that America has set the pace for the world in her system of common schools. Education, not ignorance, is everywhere the mother of devotion.
4. The character of the home missionary. The United States and Canada have produced a great race of home missionaries, such as Robertson, who helped to dot the land with Presbyterian churches, and whose name is a household word in Canada, or John Eliot, who wrote the first book published in America, of whom the poet Southey says, "No greater man has ever been produced by any nation;" David Brainard, whose life of prayer has been an inspiration to many thousands of students of missionary history; or Sheldon Jackson, with his eye ever on the horizon, but with practical zeal, not only preaching the gospel throughout the vast regions of the West but introducing the reindeer into Alaska, thus making a great economic contribution to the blessing of mankind. These men are typical of those intrepid heroes, who on the prairies of western Canada, in the mining sections of the United States, or in the heart of great cities, are the founders of empires as well as the builders of churches; as Dr. C. L. Thompson has well said, "The march of our civilization is to the music of our religion."
When the historian correctly interprets the story of national progress in the nineteenth century, he will first of all take account of the home missionary. No one has helped more than he to make the nation great and strong. As J. Wesley Johnston puts it, "The home missionary was a founder of schools, a builder of churches, a maker of states, a signer of treaties, an unfurler of flags, and always and everywhere a genuine American."
5. The home of great world movements. It must not be forgotten that out of American faith and courage and vision were born the most conspicuous missionary movements of modern times. The Moravians and Lutherans in Germany and William Carey and others in Great Britain blazed the way for the modern missionary uprising. In America the movement for world evangelization was greatly quickened and expanded by companies of students at Williams College and Andover Seminary. The purpose of these young men to carry the gospel abroad when North America was not represented by missionaries anywhere in the non-Christian world, was at the same time a mighty challenge to faith and a rebuke to the narrow vision of American Christianity one hundred years ago. Since that day practically all the conspicuous interdenominational missionary movements have begun their career in America. What student of missionary history can forget that the Student Volunteer Movement was born in a conference called by Dwight L. Moody! This Movement caused America to dream of a union of college men throughout the world for the world-wide propagation of the gospel. The fruition of that vision is The World's Student Christian Federation, binding together the students of many lands and thousands of institutions of higher learning. Let it not be forgotten that God planted here the conviction that missionary education is central in the life of the Church and that ten years ago at Silver Bay on Lake George, began what was then known as the Young People's Missionary Movement but which has recently been renamed the Missionary Education Movement of the United States and Canada. This Movement has spread to other lands. In North America alone in the ten years, more than one million copies of text-books and large numbers of other publications have been circulated by this Movement.
The latest of these evidences of the missionary life of North America is the Laymen's Missionary Movement, which is now organized in fourteen of the principal denominations of North America, with affiliated movements in three others, and in six other lands, with the first steps taken toward the forming of three additional national organizations. Never, until the Laymen's Missionary Movement flung out the challenge have Canada and the United States so powerfully felt the call to proceed seriously to undertake to evangelize their share of the world.