For convenience the facts may be grouped under three general heads:

I. World Conditions Favorable to the Spread of
Christianity

An Accessible World.—1. Improved means of intercommunication. That we live in a contracting world is strikingly illustrated by the fact that when Robert Morrison went to China it took him seventy-eight days to reach New York from England, and four months to go from New York to China. Hunter Corbett, of China, who was six months on his way the first time he took the trip, made the journey a few months ago in twenty-one days. It is now possible to go from Peking to London in twelve and one-half days over the Trans-Siberian Railroad. A recent journey around the world was made in less than thirty-six days. When Jules Verne published Around the World in Eighty Days, the journey described was laughed at as an impossible feat. To-day it is possible to circle the globe in less than one half the time of which Jules Verne wrote in his book. It took the old Greeks forty days to go the length of the Mediterranean Sea in their swiftest triremes. The greatest stretch of open water in the world is 10,000 miles in the Pacific Ocean. There are vessels afloat to-day that can traverse the 10,000 miles in one half the time that it took the old Greeks to go the length of the Mediterranean Sea.

2. The nations of the earth are accessible because of changed sentiment.

There are to-day no lands in the world which are closed entirely to modern influence and only a few which do not at least tolerate the Christian missionary with his advanced ideas of civilization and progress. It is difficult to estimate the amazing changes in sentiment in lands where missionaries have been at work even for a generation, as in Korea, or for a century or more, as in India or China.

It is unthinkable that there should ever be another Chinese wall shutting out all world contact. Edicts in force as late as 1870 ordering the death of Christians in Japan are now exhibited only as relics of a buried past. The twentieth century is making hermit nations impossible.

3. A mental attitude has been created in the non-Christian world which nothing but Christ can satisfy. This may be only an indefinite restlessness and dissatisfaction with existing conditions in many cases, but it is apparently true that the principles of the Christian gospel have created an altogether new mental attitude in the world. It is stated by one of the great missionary authorities in India that there are millions of people in that land who are intellectually converted to the gospel who have not yet yielded personal allegiance to Christ. This mental attitude is an enormous asset to the Kingdom.

A Plastic World.—The nations of our day are plastic to a degree never before witnessed. Heat, pressure, and decay, are some of the forces which make physical substances plastic. There are intellectual and moral and spiritual forces which produce a like effect on men and nations. As great heat applied to metal fuses it, so the ideas and forces of the twentieth century have fused the non-Christian world. Pressure, such as foreign aggression, world commerce, and modern science have helped to bring about the present plastic state in vast sections of the world. Added to these two and accompanying them are the forces of disintegration and decay in the old religions, old forms of government, and the customs and habits of centuries. In itself this present remarkable state of the non-Christian world has no moral quality. The significant thing is that, while nations are in a plastic state, they offer special opportunity to put the stamp of Christianity on them before they harden again, and to determine the direction their civilization shall take by building into them the principles of Christian civilization and the Christian faith.