outlying fields of foreign missionary effort and with the conviction increased, that the doctrines of our standards are as worthy of credence and industrious promulgation to-day, as when Andrews preached them in the "Barbadoes Warehouse," James Anderson advocated them on the banks of the Hudson, Josias Makie heralded them beside the Elizabeth river, or Charles Cummings proclaimed them where the Watauga and Holston join their currents with the curving Tennessee, this meeting of our Presbyterian clans in 1888 will have met the purpose of its projection a year ago, and left a blessing on our Church whose fruit shall be gathered in the years to come.

From the doings of this centennial day, if God but add His blessing, good results must needs follow. The retrospect prompted by the celebration will, 1. Awaken and sustain a sense of dependence upon the God of our fathers. At Kadeshbarnea, Moses, the man of God, exhorted the tribes to review of their course from Horeb to where they stood with the goodly land before them. The divine presence had attended them along the way. But for His care they would not have survived the march, and without His intervention the land could not be possessed. God sent these wandering people bread from the heavens, water from the rock and preserved the shoes and garments they wore while pillars of cloud and fire bespoke His presence and pointed them the way to Canaan. Against the enemies waiting to dispute their possession of the land they would be as incapable of contending without His help as they were dependent on His bounty in the wilderness. The whole situation, with its retrospect and prospect, was enough to teach humility and throw them upon God in an implicit trust. Under the date of 1723, George Gillespie, of the Synod of Philadelphia, writes to a brother in Scotland thus: "It would appear that our glorious Christ hath great designs in America; though I am afraid not to be effectuated in my day." Says he, "There are not above thirty ministers and probationer preachers in our Synod." In 1788, when the Synod resolved to organize the General Assembly, the sixteen Presbyteries that were to form that Assembly over which John Rodgers was called to preside and to which John Witherspoon preached the opening sermon, consisted of 177 ministers, 111 probationers and 419 churches. A year later the churches had increased to 432, with a membership of 18,000, contributing to mission causes eight hundred and fifty-two dollars. When we compare the present with the past we feel that God has helped us and given enlargement to our Zion; that the pioneers struggled on against discouragement, like Caldwell, of Elizabethtown, New Jersey; McWhorter, of Knox's brigade; Adam Boyd, Daniel McCalla and George Duffield; that the

handful of corn on the tops of the mountain grew on, until today the 18,000 have come to be almost a million, we must give the praise to our Covenant-Keeping God. Extend your view eighty-two years back of 1788 and you see a still more inconsiderable beginning of things. We are more than ever convinced that the God whose presence with Israel was symbolized in the guiding pillar of cloud, whose blessing on Gideon made 300 with their pitchers rout Midian on the field and who helped Elijah to a splendid victory on Carmel, has piloted American Presbyterianism through the perils of a century and has rendered all its efforts towards aggression and defense successful. Eighty-two years back of the first Assembly we see a Presbytery with seven ministers: Andrews, Taylor, Wilson, Davis and McKemie, with two Scotch missionaries lately arrived. This was the handful of corn, the fruit of which is shaking to-day. This is the bush that has grown into the tree under whose boughs we rest to-day, after a hundred and eighty years of growth. It was fitting, in view of the hardships attending the founding of our Church in the New World, and the difficulties to be met in its extension, that the text for the opening sermon at the first Assembly should have been II Cor. 3: 7, teaching that man is insufficient, but God is all-sufficient. "So that neither is he that planteth any thing, neither he that watereth: but God that giveth the increase."

2. The observance of this day should move our Church, North and South, to embrace as well as measure her opportunities in this land and others. Our ears must indeed be heavy if out of that past we honor to-day there is not heard a voice to quicken our steps in the march of progress. Ours is called the "Sæculum Evangelicum "-the age of evangelism. The Church should assume more and more the attitude of aggression. We have been on the defensive long enough. Propagation of the truth, rather than further sharpening of its definitions, is the demand of the hour. We have been determining the King's Crown rights; let us go and win them as He bids us. We have been whetting the sword and judging of its temper, let us go and use it. Missionary triumph is the wonder of our age

"We are living, we are dwelling,

In a grand and awful time,
In an age on ages telling,
To be living is sublime."

The talk of forming a language for the whole world to use may be a random prophecy of a day when the race evange lized shall employ the language of Heaven. The Presby terian Church in the United States! The very name should inspire zeal. The Tarshish seamen asked Jonah, "Whence

comest thou; what is thy country?" To us this same question comes. Others have told us to-day what a door is open to us and how our responsibilities bear proportion to our opportunities in all their amplitude. In America is to be solved the problem of the world's civilization. What imagination can compass, what tongue portray the future of this land?

has

"A glorious land,

With broad arms stretched from shore to shore,

The proud Pacific chafes her strand,
She hears the loud Atlantic's roar ;
And nurtured in her ample breast,
How many a goodly prospect lies,

In nature's wildest grandeur drest,
Enameled with her loveliest dyes.'

Our

To-day the centre of population is moving westward, and the child is born that will hear the hum of two hundred millions of people in our country. Shall these coming multitudes be Christianized? The answer depends in part upon the Church whose centennial has been celebrated to-day. God put the land before us; let us go over and possess it. 3. Ere I close let me say, the celebration will have in part failed if it does not deepen our love for our Church. Church lays claim to catholicity of spirit, but this need not interfere with devotion to her doctrines, institutions and traditions. The organization of the first American Presbytery was effected in a spirit of tolerance. To form it came the Scotch-Irishman, the Scotchman, the Irishman and the Puritan missionary from New England, while London Presbyterians supplied the funds for their support. We may well love our Church for her broad fraternity toward all who reflect the image of Christ. "Presbyterianism," says one, "is truest to catholicity in that it insists upon those things that are truly catholic and declines to mingle with those things that are not catholic." Our Church may be loved for the honor she puts on the Word of God, demanding that every doctrine and rite shall find its authority in the Book, "the only infallible rule of faith and practice." We may love her for her thrilling history, for her martyrdoms to principle, for her army of confessors, for her strenuous maintenance of the principle that none but God can bind the conscience, for her friendliness to liberty, for the part she has borne in the promotion of civil and religious reform, and for her adherence to that form of belief which, to use the words of Froude, "has borne ever an inflexible front to illusion and mendacity, and has preferred rather to be ground to powder like flint than to bend before violence or melt under enervating temptation." Then, with dependence on God, with enlarged appreciation of opportunity and intensified love for our Zion, may we enter the second century of organized life as a Church.

HOME MISSIONS.

THE

BY W. W. MOORE, D.D.,

Hampden-Sidney, Va.

HE pioneers of the Home Mission work in America were those expatriated Presbyterians from Ulster who, two centuries ago, landed on the banks of the Delaware. Their successive migrations Southward laid the base line of all our subsequent work in the Southern States. They built a chain of churches from the Potomac river to the Savannah, through the heart of Virginia and the Carolinas, which have ever since constituted the Presbyterian stronghold.

It is important to bear in mind that from the beginning this sturdy element was the back-bone of the Revolution. These were the men who settled the historic county of Mecklenburg in North Carolina, and to whom Mr. Bancroft referred when he said that "The first voice publicly raised in America to dissolve all connection with Great Britain came, not from the Puritans of New England, not from the Dutch of New: York, not from the planters of Virginia, but from the Scotch.. Irish Presbyterians of North Carolina." Fourteen months

after that memorable action, when, in this city, the Colonial Congress was hesitating to pass the Declaration of National Independence, it was the eloquence of an illustrious Presbyterian that swept the waverers to a decision-John Witherspoon, the only minister of any denomination who signed that immortal document. Later still, in one of the darkest hours of the Revolution, the great Washington himself said that, should all his plans be crushed, he would plant his standard on the Blue Ridge, and, rallying round him the Scotch-Irish, make a final and successful stand for freedom on the Virginia frontier. To this sterling strain belongs the unique distinction of being the only race in America that never produced a Tory. In fine, as Dr. DeWitt has well said, while the Quakers were non-combatants and stood aloof from the conflict; while the Episcopalians as a rule were against the colonies and in favor of the Crown; while the Methodists followed the mother Church and imitated John Wesley himself in their denunciations of the revolting Americans, the Congregational ministers

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of New England, and the Presbyterian ministers from Long Island to Georgia, gave to the cause of the colonies all that they could give of the sanction of religion. The Presbyterian ministers upheld it in the pulpit, in the press, and on the field, some of them becoming both chaplains and commanders.

HISTORICAL CONSPECTUS OF HOME MISSIONS.

These familiar facts are by no means irrelevant to the history of Home Missions. They gave Presbyterianism her coigne of vantage for evangelizing America. That Church which had been the chief champion of civil and religious freedom, and whose form of government was the mould of the Republic, held a unique place in the affections of the people. Her loyalty to the cause of Independence made it peculiarly appropriate that she should give the Gospel to the new nation. and conquer this continent for Christ. The great men who composed that first Assembly saw and seized the opportunity. With but few exceptions they were themselves home missionaries, and the subject which excited their deepest interest was the work of carrying the Gospel to the outlying districts of the Synods. If the Presbyterian Church has forfeited her empire in America, the reason is that the supreme importance of this subject and its vital relation to every other branch of our work have not been so fully recognized by later Assemblies as by those farsighted patriots of 1789. They knew their work and did it. How wisely they organized and how zealously they labored may be seen in part by the results which can be tabulated to-day, notwithstanding all the sterile controversies and baneful dissensions of their successors. There were 16 Presbyteries then, there are 389 now; 177 ministers then, 8333 now; 419 churches then, 11,212 now; 15,000 members then, 992,305 now. The population of the country then was 3,000,000, now it is 60,000,000. The increase of population in the century, therefore, has been twentyfold, that of our communicants more than sixtyfold. The collection for Home Missions in 1789 amounted to $400, in 1887 nearly $900,000. During the century over 1,500,000 souls have been added to the Church on confession of faith. These cold figures alone tell a stirring story of Home Missions.

The brevity to which I am constrained forbids any detailed description of this marvelous growth. But the scantiest resumé of our subject would be incomplete without some reference to that constellation of missionaries raised up in the great revival at Hampden-Sidney in 1788, each of whom itinerated vast regions of country on a salary of $200 a year; to the men of Redstone, who planted to such purpose that