We of the West boast of our national history. But how brief is our day compared with the succession of world powers which Asia has seen. Chaldea began the march of kingdoms 2,200 years before Christ. Its proud king, Chedor-laomer, ruled from the Persian Gulf to the sources of the Euphrates, and from the Zagros Mountains to the Mediterranean. Then Egypt arose to rule not only over the northeastern part of Africa, but over half of Arabia and all of the preceding territory of Chaldea. Assyria followed, stretching from the Black Sea nearly half-way down the Persian Gulf and from the Mediterranean to the eastern boundary of modern Persia. Babylon, too, was once a world power whose monarch sat ``High on a throne of royal state, which far Outshone the wealth of Ormus or of Ind.''[1] [1] Milton, ``Paradise Lost,'' Book II. Persia was mightier still. Two thousand years before America was heard of, while France and Germany, England and Spain, were savage wildernesses, Persia was the abode of civilization and culture, of learning and eloquence. Her empire extended from the Indus to the Danube and from the Oxus to the Nile, embracing twenty satrapies each one of whose governors was well-nigh a king. Alexander the Great, too, at the head of his invincible army, swept over vast areas of Asia, capturing cities, unseating rulers, and bringing well-nigh all the civilized world under his dominion. And was not Rome also an Asiatic power, for it stretched not only from the firths of Scotland on the north to the deserts of Africa on the south, but from the Atlantic Ocean on the west to the River Euphrates on the east. Altogether it is a majestic but awful procession, overwhelming us by its grandeur and yet no less by its horror. It is a kaleidoscope on a colossal scale, whose pieces appear like fragments of a broken universe. Empires rise and fall. Thrones are erected and overturned. The mightiest creations of man vanish. Yea, they have all waxed ``old as doth a garment,'' and ``as a vesture'' are they ``changed.'' But were these ancient nations the last of Asia? Has that mighty continent nothing more to contribute to the world than the memories of a mighty past? It is impossible to believe that this is all. The historic review gives a momentum which the mind cannot easily overcome. As we look towards the Far East, we can plainly see that the evolution is incomplete. Whatever purpose the Creator had in mind has certainly not yet been accomplished. More than two-thirds of those innumerable myriads have as yet never heard of those high ideals of life and destiny which God Himself revealed to men. It is incredible that a wise God should have made such a large part of the world only to arrest its development at its present unfinished stage, inconceivable that He should have made and preserved so large a part of the human race for no other and higher purpose than has yet been achieved.