'While I have been writing this letter I have overheard my Chinese servant saying, in reply to a question from a Chinaman, "There is such a thing as a preaching letter: you can preach by a letter." So I am going now to preach. Don't get weary; stick to it. Don't be lazy, but don't be in a hurry. Slow but sure; stick to it. We have no great effort to make, but rather to stick to it patiently. "_No good work is lost_," Sir William Thomson used to say in his philosophy class, and it is eminently true in our case. (I wish these Chinamen would hold their tongue.) All our good work will be found, there is no doubt about that. All I am afraid of is that our good work will amount to little when it is found. (These Chinamen are a bore.) I sometimes think that if all we say be true, as it is, that men at last shall stand before God--and we shall see them after they know that all we say is true--and they will pitch into us for not pitching into them more savagely; for not, in fact, taking them by the "cuff" of the neck and dragging them into the kingdom of God. I speak now of our countrymen and foreigners. As regards heathen, they too shall stand revealed; and their mud gods also, and rotten superstitions, shall stand revealed: how then shall we feel when they shall look at us and blame us for not waking them up more vigorously? An infidel has said that if he could believe that men's future state depended at all upon what was done in this life, he would let nothing hinder him from being up and at men. He would be content to be counted a madman--anything, if only he could do anything to make men's state better in the world to come. (I wish these Chinamen would shut up; I came here to meet Mongols, and I am like to be flooded out by Chinamen whose language I only half understand.)