"The glory of young men is their strength" and hope. It would hardly be fair to expect an old man of seventy-two, who had borne the heat and burden of the day, and was already broken in health and by many sorrows, to feel as hopeful and buoyant concerning things at the end of the earth as a young man not yet thirty. Yet none more than himself felt humiliated and took rebukes gladly, when he realized that he had not honored his Master by as large a measure of faith as he ought to have done. Late in 1870, just before leaving for Japan, to which country I had been invited by the lord of Echizen, to organize the education of the lads of his province according to Occidental principles and in modern methods,[10] I called on my old pastor to receive his blessing and take farewell. Always hearty in his welcome and kindly in his interest, I felt that his faith was not as strong concerning the educational and missionary conquest of the Far East, as his preaching and long-continued interest had led me to expect. As with the war for freedom and national life, so in the war for the Everlasting Kingdom, it seemed to me he took a too local view of a great subject. I was genuinely surprised that, instead of heartily cheering me, he seemed to discourage me. He spoke gloomily of the vast masses of untouched heathenism and said that anything I could do was only as a drop in the bucket. [Footnote 10: See Verbeck of Japan, Chapter XI.] Nevertheless, by the grace of God, I intended to make that drop tell, and I felt that what man could not do, God would. I entered the Japan, in which no native Christian dared then to make confession of his faith, in which no more converts to Reformed Christianity than could be enumerated on the fingers of one hand were known, and in which descendants of the Roman Catholics of the early seventeenth century were still in the crypts, undiscovered yet, even by the French missionaries then on the soil. At that time, 1870, feudalism with its mediæval ideals was the rule of society. A half dozen government schools on Western principles, and only one or two of missionary origin, were in their infancy. I went out to live four years in the East, one of them as a lone exile in Fukui. This was the Japan which Verbeck, Brown, and Hepburn by Christian teaching and healing, which Satow, Aston, and Chamberlin through scholarship, and which Kido, Okubo, and Iwakura by political action were reconstructing, and where all the fascinations and horrors of the pagan world were rampant. No life insurance company in America would then insure my life, except at a heavy premium.