The time has come to ``attempt great things for God, expect great things from God.'' When in 1806, those five students in Williamstown, Massachusetts, held that immortal conference in the lee of a haystack, talked of the mighty task of world evangelization and wondered whether it could be accomplished, it was given to Samuel J. Mills to cry out: ``We can if we will!'' And the little company took up the cry and literally shouted it to the heavens: ``We can if we will!'' ``A growing church among a strong people burdened by a decadent Empire--the spirit of life working against the forces of death and decay in the one great Pagan Empire which the wrecks of millenniums have left on the earth--surely there is a call to service that might fire the spirit of the dullest of us.''[110] The obstacles are indeed formidable, but he who can look beneath the eddying flotsam and jetsam of the surface to the mighty undercurrents which are sweeping majestically onward can exclaim with Gladstone:-- ``Time is on our side. The great social forces which move onward in their might and majesty, and which the tumults of these strifes do not for a moment impede or disturb--those forces are marshalled in our support. And the banner which we now carry in the fight, though perhaps at some moment of the struggle it may droop over our sinking hearts, yet will float again in the eye of heaven and will be borne, perhaps not to an easy, but to a certain and to a not distant victory.''[111] [110] Gibson, p. 331. [111] Speech on the Reform Bill. In a famous art gallery, there is a famous painting called ``Anno Domini.'' It represents an Egyptian temple, from whose spacious courts a brilliant procession of soldiers, statesmen, philosophers, artists, musicians and priests is advancing in triumphal march, bearing a huge idol, the challenge and the boast of heathenism. Across the pathway of the procession is an ass, whose bridle is held by a reverent looking man and upon whose back is a fair young mother with her infant child. It is Jesus, entering Egypt in flight from the wrath of Herod, and thus crossing the path of aggressive heathenism. Then the clock strikes and the Christian era begins. It is a noble parable. Its fulfillment has been long delayed till the Child has become a Man, crucified, risen, crowned. But now in majesty and power, He stands across the pathway of advancing heathenism in China. There may be confusion and tumult for a time. The heathen may rage, ``and the rulers take counsel together against the Lord.'' But the idol shall be broken ``with a rod of iron,'' and the King upon his holy hill shall have ``the heathen for `his' inheritance and the uttermost parts of the earth for `his' possession.'' For a consummation so majestic in its character and so vital to the welfare not only of China but of the whole human race we may well make our own the organ-voiced invocation of Milton:--