Lansing Burrows (the Baptist) and
Bishop Candler (the Methodist) un
derstand Christ any better than those
who looked into his eyes and watched
His lips as He gave them His march
ing orders? I think your own com
mon sense will dictate the answer,
“No! a thousand times, no!” Those
Ghe Jeffersonian
original apostles who moved and
worked and talked in the very atmos
phere with Christ —some of them
eating with Him every day, and some
of them, doubtless, sleeping with
Him in the same room every night—
those are the men who must have
got His true meaning. At any rate,
the marvelous spread of the new gos
pel by the Pauline method is over
whelming proof of the merit, the
divinity, the miraculous power of
that plan. The fact that no change
was made in it until it had existed
for nearly eighteen hundred and fifty
years, is presumptive evidence of the
most convincing character that that
way of doing the work was the right
way.
I have never said or written a
word agaiinst foreign missions. I
bow my head obediently to the com
mand, “Go ye, and preach the word!”
But I don’t believe that we ought to
take the bread out of the mouths of
our own children and carry it to the
children of the Chinese. I don’t be
lieve we ought to leave learning a
sealed book to our own children and
open it to the Japanese. I don’t be
lieve we ought to desert the sick man
and the sick woman, to suffer and die
like homeless dogs all over Christian
America, while we erect up-to-date
dispensaries and hospitals in heathen
lands.
