they expect us of the United States to bring the law to them. They remember that it was our people who first swung open the gates of their land to the world. It was a representative of our people who first took up his residence among them with a completed treaty in his hands. It was our people who built the first railway for them and set up the first telegraph line. Two-fifths of all their exports are bought by us. From our newspapers they get the world's news, except the scanty bits telegraphed through India or Siberia. It was our school system which they adopted as their model. It was our missionaries who began work among them ten years ahead of those from any other land. The type of Christianity in Japan, as far as it takes on any foreign features, is decidedly ours; and so it is plain that if there is any great mission field of the world which the Lord of the harvest has especially entrusted to American laborers, it is Japan. Since it is the Presbyterians and our old allies of the American Board who have gathered the majority of all the Protestant Christians in that land, to us has been given the foremost place in this work. Now, then, may we best signalize the centennial which we this day celebrate? What token of gratitude and love may we most fittingly lay at the feet of our glorious King? I do not undervalue other offerings which have been named. I would not depreciate other enterprises which have been proposed. But, I do say this: if by self-sacrifice, by liberality, by noble endeavor, we would win for our royal Master at this time a trophy worthy of the age in which we live, there is but one way for it: we must gain Japan. Let us rally our churches, as one man, for the effort; let us summon our old comrades of the American Board to pour in their supplies of money and men; yea, let us invoke the aid of all in the United States who love the Lord Jesus Christ. In every great city of Japan and in every hamlet, on the mountain side and in the deep valley, let the Gospel be preached at once to every man, woman and child; then will the spirit of light and love descend, and a nation will be born in a day.

The triumph which we believe draws near in Japan is but a presage of the result which we are assured will be seen over the whole earth. "This Gospel of the kingdom," says the King himself, "shall be preached in all the world, for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come."

His word is pledged to it. This Foreign Mission work shall be accomplished. The glad tidings of the Saviour shall be preached to every creature. The victorious end shall come. But with us it is left to determine whether that end shall be hastened or whether it shall be deferred. Shall we preach the Gospel at once in all the world unto all nations? Or shall

we by our faithlessness and lethargy hold back the Gospel and delay the consummate hour? "The end," says the Master. The end of what? The end of this earthly conflict, with all its dust and toil and blood; the end of the sorrow and crying, the end of pain, the end of death. For then the Master will come the second time without sin unto salvation. He will make all things new. With His own light and power and beauty He will fill all things. Fathers and brethren, it matters not here whether we be Pre-millenarians or Post-millenarians, here we are all at one. For every friend of our Lord and Saviour there is but one blessed hope; it is His glorious appearing and the resurrection of the dead. We cast our eyes out over this earth on which we dwell, we see it turned by the curse of sin into one vast cemetery. Among the multitudes who sleep in the dust there are those dear to you who have fallen asleep in Jesus. Those bodies sown in weakness, sown in corruption, sown in dishonor, must lie in the grave till the Gospel has been preached unto all nations--till the end shall come. Here at this hour unlock the chambers of your memory, call up the vanished faces, and you have the high argument of the Foreign Mission work. For myself, standing to-night on this spot, I am enchained with visions of the past. A little more than fifty years ago from the historic church in this city in which one of the venerable Assemblies now before me last week convened, there went forth a young bride, who made her new and gladsome home in the State of Virginia. Ten years passed, and a mournful procession, in which was a little group of weeping children following the silent form of the mother, who clasped in her arms an infant daughter, hushed like herself in death, came from the State of Virginia back to this city. Almost within a stone's throw of where I now stand the tones of the pastor of the First Church fell on my childish ears as he invoked for us the consolations of God, and then those beloved forms were borne forth and laid to rest on the beautiful slope of Laurel Hill. And now after so many years I find myself brought back here by the hand of God to plead the cause of the dead, of all the sainted dead of us gathered here in this centennial year, of the sainted dead of all the centuries past. Those bodies which lie in weakness, in corruption, in dishonor, await the day on which they shall come forth arrayed in incorruption, in glory, in power, and amid the splendors of the new heavens and the new earth, they and we shall stand in the presence of our Lord and there shall be fullness of joy. And there shall be no more death, no more sorrow nor crying, no more pain. Oh, what heart must not long for that day! What voice must not pray that it may come quickly!

There is but one thing needed to usher it in. This Gospel of the kingdom must be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations, and then shall the end come. Here in the hundreds of millions spread before us who have not heard the name of Christ we see our great task; there in the end we see our reward. Then, by the love we bear to the dead who rest, by the pity we have for the living who wait, by the loyalty we cherish to our King, who died for the world, let every man and every woman now rise to the work. Oh, speed the message of salvation across every ocean, carry it onward to every tribe. Press forward; tell the glad tidings to the next man and the next and the next. Let the wave of life and blessing sweep swiftly over the face of the whole earth, and then the triumphant end is ours.

HISTORIC PRESBYTERIAN CHAR

ACTERS.

BY REV. CHARLES L. THOMPSON, D.D.,

Kansas City, Mo.

WA

ALKING along the shores of Profile lake in the White mountains. the eye instinctively turns toward the great granite mass that, scarred and rugged, towers above the Western shore. A few more steps and what was an irregular-scarped cliff, the monument of prehistoric storms begins to give the rude semblance of a human face. A turn in the path, and the outline of "The Old Man of the Mountain" is full upon your vision, every feature cut clear against the sunset. The road of the centuries brings character into view. We do not need to describe a great man. We need only to get away from him. History sublimates character. The ages give perspective in which all littleness disappears and only true greatness remains. And what is history at last but the biography of greatness? "It is all to be explained from individual experience."

From this crest of the century let us look back upon the faces illumined by our position. Let us look along the cliffs of great events and see the men, who to their own age were an offense-to following ages, a mystery-but to us appear clear cut and beautiful, the incarnation of great ideas, and the exponents of historic epochs. We will travel to-night, not to see the Alps, the Pyrenees, or the Grampians, but the souls that look out from their stormy heights. An hour's walk through the Gallery of Battles, in Versailles, carries you through the romantic and thrilling ages of French history. A half hour among Presbyterian characters will imply three centuries of Presbyterian history, say rather of world-history for in this period this world has sprung to its most splendid

career.

Remembering that the centuries of time are to be explained by the hours of human life, let us find in men the origin and significance of our history. Presbyterianism stands for a definite whole of life and doctrine. We rejoice in its sunlight.

We have dwelt on the religious and civil liberty it fosters, on the systematic truth it holds, and the vital relations it sustains to all that is best in human progress. But these general ideas have men back of them. Shall there be a deliverance from Egypt? Then Moses must come. A protest against idolatry? Let Elijah spring like an apparition from the wilderness. An expectation of the Messiah? Let John the Baptist utter its voice. So, back of these last centuries, when humanity has taken a new direction, I am sure some men are standing whose vital force is with us yet. American Presbyterianism has a far and profound origin. Our sun had elsewhere its rising. That "lane of beams athwart the sea," that lit the Mayflower's path through the wintry ocean, traced back to Europe, reveals sunrise in many lands. Not alone does it gladden the dull Holland marshes; it plays on the Alpine range, shimmers over the Black Forest and transfigures the mists of Scotland.

It is an accepted philosophic fact that the combination of diverse elements in nature and life is the condition of the best and strongest forms. That combination has made the AngloSaxon the dominant race of modern history; it promises to make the American Republic the most vital part of AngloSaxon life. So our Presbyterianism is the last resultant of many forces. As the life of a nation has its prophet in the ideas and principles at the heart of it, so the past of our Church may somewhat forecast its future. To what conquests are the ideas which fashioned its childhood adapted to carry its manhood? What truths in their harmony and potency stand sponsors for its destiny? In the lives of men, in the iron of their blood, we will find the answer.

Studying the philosophy of our times and casting about for the shaping ideas of modern thinking, I perceive that chief among them all is the personal authority of God. It stands between a vapid spiritism on the one hand and a cold materialism on the other. It is the nerve of our best thinking, the force within all true heroisms, the conservator of our philosophy, the strength of our theology, and the tonic generally of modern civilization. Specially were the early centuries of our history times in which God's rule among men was cut sharp and deep into the popular consciousness. To that more than to any other one idea may be traced the robust and sinewy character of colonial life and the solemn earnestness of colonial struggles for independence. That truth, more than any other in the subsequent times of skeptical challenge of the throne of God, has been the tense and sufficient cable to hold both Church and State loyal to our historic antecedents and to enable us to keep our faith sternly with our fathers and our God. Perhaps the historic position of Israel is to be