``Out there the great issue is tried with all external helps removed. The gospel goes to China with no subsidiary aids. It is spoken to the people by the stammering lips of aliens. Those who accept it do so with no prospect of temporal gain. They go counter to all their own preconceptions, and to all the prejudices of their people. Try as we may to become all things to all men, we can but little accommodate our teaching to their thought. . . . Often and often have I looked into the faces of a crowd of non-Christian Chinese and felt keenly how many barriers lay between their minds and mine. Reasoning that seems to me conclusive makes no appeal to them. Even the words we use to convey religious ideas do not bear to their minds one-hundredth part of the meaning we wish to put into them. I have often thought that if I were to expend all my energies to persuade one Chinaman to change the cut of his coat, or to try some new experiment in agriculture, I should certainly plead in vain. And yet I stand up to beg him to change the habits of a lifetime, to break away from the whole accumulated outcome of heredity, to make himself a target for the scorn of the world in which he lives, to break off from the consolidated social system which has shaped his being, and on the bare word of an unknown stranger to plunge into the hazardous experiment of a new and untried life, to be lived on a moral plane still almost inconceivable to him, whose sanctions and rewards are higher than his thoughts as heaven is higher than earth. While I despair of inducing him by my reasonings to make the smallest change in the least of his habits, I ask him, not with a light heart, but with a hopeful one, to submit his whole being to a change that is for him the making of his whole world anew. `Credo quia impossis- ble,' I believe it can be done because I know I cannot do it, and the smallest success is proof of the working of the divine power. The missionary must either confess himself helpless, or he must to the last fibre of his being believe in the Holy Ghost. I choose to believe, nay I am shut up to believe, by what my eyes have seen.