'I don't know your Tientsin Church history, but if it is anything like ours here you would find men standing nowhere almost as to Christian character, who but for drink and its concomitants might, humanly speaking, have shone. And yet these are men to get whom out of sin Christ died--brethren, for whom Christ died. 'Pardon me again when I take a short cut to what I want to say: "_I believe were Christ here now as a missionary amongst us He would be an enthusiastic teetotaller and a non-smoker._" 'Tobacco is comparatively a harmless matter, but it is not so unimportant as it seems to us foreigners. Whisky should go, and I feel that the Chinese would be quite ready, if led, to turn both whisky and tobacco out together. They are born brothers in China, _useless_, and _acknowledged_ to be such; harmful as far as they are anything, and comparatively expensive. 'I would like to see you start in your church an anti-tobacco and whisky society; voluntary, of course, in a church established as yours on the old lines. Though I stand alone, I believe the flowing tide is with me. 'Wishing you many souls in 1887, and eager that no minor difference of opinion should hinder our prayers. 'Yours I-hardly-know-how-to-say-what, 'JAMES GILMOUR.' In the _Chinese Recorder_, for which he had been in the habit of writing for many years, he published a paper in which he set forth with great clearness and fulness his views on this important matter. It deserves a place in the story of his life because in it he has sketched, as no one else could, himself, and some of his later methods of evangelistic address. 'In December, 1885, in a district of North China new to me, I found myself preaching to a small crowd of Chinese and Mongols in a small market town. I was in a lane leading on to the main street. At my back was a mud wall, in front and at both sides was the audience, within hearing was the main street, above, a bright sun made the place warm and cheerful. After listening a while the audience wanted to know how good seasons could be secured. To the truths I had been preaching they had listened with respect and fair attention, but at the first opportunity for speaking they wanted to know how to get a good harvest.