It may be said that this is a purely sentimental consideration. But so may love for country, for liberty, for wife and children, be called a sentiment. God forbid that the time should ever come when men will not be influenced by sentiment. The intuitions of the heart are as apt to be correct as the dictates of the head. I candidly admit that as I stood amid the ruins of the mission buildings in China, as I faced the surviving Christians and remembered what they had suffered, the property they had lost and the dear ones they had seen murdered,--as I stood with bared head on the spot where devoted missionaries had perished, I was conscious of a deeper consecration to the task of uplifting China. And I am not willing to admit that such a dedication of the living to the continuance of the work of the dead is a mere sentiment. We are not wise above what is written when we declare that the eternal purpose of God comprehends China as well as Europe and America. He did not create those hundreds of millions of human beings simply to fertilize the soil in which their bodies will decay. He has not preserved China as a nation for nearly half a hundred centuries for nothing. Out of the apparent wreck, the new dispensation will come, is already coming. Frightened men thought that the fall of Rome meant the end of the world, but we can see that it only cleared the way for a better world. Pessimists feared that the violence and blood of the Crusades would ruin Europe, but instead they broke up the stagnation of the Middle Ages and made possible the rise of modern Europe. The faint-hearted said that the India mutiny of 1857 and the Syria massacres of 1860 ended all hope of regenerating those countries, but in both they ushered in the most successful era of missions. So the barriers which have separated China from the rest of the world must, like the medieval wall of Tien-tsin, be cast down and over them a highway for all men be made. No one sup- posed that the process would be so sudden and violent. But in the Boxer uprising the hammer of God did in months what would otherwise have taken weary generations. Some were discouraged because the air was filled with the deafening tumult and the blinding dust and the flying debris. Many lost heart and wanted to sound a retreat because some of God's chosen ones were crushed in the awful rending. But the wiser and more far-seeing heard a new call to utilize the larger opportunity which resulted. Up to this time we have been playing with foreign missions. It is now time for Christendom to understand that its great work in the twentieth century is to plan this movement on a scale gigantic in comparison with anything it has yet done, and to grapple intelligently, generously and resolutely, with the stupendous task of Christianizing China.