Second,--If China should ever make such a demand in repudiation of the treaties which she herself has expressly acknowledged to be valid, and if all the Powers should support her in that demand, does anybody doubt what the missionary would say? We know at any rate what he has said in similar circumstances. When Peter and John were scourged and forbidden to preach any more in the name of Jesus, friendless and penniless though they were, they ringingly answered: ``Whether it be right in the sight of God to hearken unto you more than unto God, judge ye. For we cannot but speak the things which we have seen and heard.'' When Martin Luther was arraigned before the most powerful tribunal in Europe, he declared: ``Here I stand. God help me. I can do no other.'' When the Russian Minister in Constantinople haughtily said to Dr. Schauffler, ``My master, the Czar of all the Russias, will not let you put foot on that territory,''--the intrepid missionary replied: ``My Master, the Lord Jesus Christ, will never ask the Czar of all the Russias where He shall put His foot.'' Scores of missionaries have not hesitated to say to hostile authorities: ``I did not receive my commission from any earthly potentate but from the King of Kings, and I shall, I must go on.'' Some will say that this is madness. So of old men said of Christ, ``He hath a demon''; so they said of Paul, ``Thou art beside thyself.'' If magnificent moral courage and unyielding devotion to duty are ``madness,'' then the more the world has of it the better. The effort to minimize the significance of the missionary force in China will be made only by those who, destitute of any vital religious faith themselves, of course see no reason for communicating it to others, or by those who are strangely blind and deaf to the real issues of the age. In the words of Benjamin Kidd, ``it is not improbable that, to a future observer, one of the most curious features of our time will appear to be the prevailing unconsciousness of the real nature of the issues in the midst of which we are living.'' ``No more did the statesmen and the philosophers of Rome understand the character and issues of that greatest movement of all history, of which their literature takes so little notice. That the greatest religious change in the history of mankind should have taken place under the eyes of a brilliant galaxy of philosophers and historians who were profoundly conscious of decomposition around them; that all these writers should have utterly failed to predict the issue of the movement they were then observing; and that during the space of three centuries they should have treated as simply contemptible an agency which all men must now admit to have been, for good or evil, the most powerful moral lever that has ever been applied to the affairs of men, are facts well worthy of meditation in every period of religious transition.''[107] [107] Lecky, ``History of European Morals,'' Vol. 1, p. 359.