2. Another function of life is its expulsive power. What it cannot use and assimilate it expels. It gathers the good and casts the bad away. Strong, vigorous life depends as much upon the one function as the other. The religious world is full of the germs and larvæ of skepticism, theistic and atheistic assaults and criticisms. A robust person can walk in the midst of pestilence unscathed, while disease springs upon one whose vitality is depressed. Precisely the same condition obtains in respect to the individual disciple, or the church, or our missionary boards. The one effective answer to skepticism, then, of every grade and degree of virulence; the one sovereign remedy for worldliness, apathy and avarice of God’s people, is a new enduement of spiritual power. Our lips must be touched with celestial fire and our hearts bathed in Christ’s great love. 3. Another quality of life is its expansive power. The mightiest force in this world is life. It mocks at gravity; it defies cohesion; bursts every band. The same expansive property inheres in spiritual life. You might as well shut up a growing chicken in its shell as to shut up a live Christianity in the shell of the fathers. No. Where there is life there must be expansion. She breaks through old traditions and prejudices, and steps out into new departures and broader methods, and pushes on into new regions of thought and conquest beyond. She lays her hand on the colored man of the South, saves, educates him, equips him for the life that now is, as well as for that which is to come. She stands on the shores of the great Pacific, where the shining waves lave her feet and chant their mighty anthems of freedom, and, with open, arms and a catholic heart, free of all race prejudices, welcomes the Chinaman. She uncovers the cross in the wigwam of the red man and bids the dusky sons of the forest look and live. 4. Once more spiritual life is the only complete bond of union. Says President Hopkins, “It is on this that the whole method of God in the restoration of man is based, and it is for the recognition of this by men, and their adoption of God’s method of vitality and unity, the tardy, laboring and discordant times wait. No partial reform will do; no coming man. Everywhere men are divergent, repellant. The bond of common humanity is but a string of tow to bind the Samson of human selfishness and passions. There must be a divine life, a divine centre. This center is Christ. He is the life. The nexus which is to bind this selfish world in one, and unite all races and nationalities in one common fellowship and forward movement to disciple the world, is Christ in the souls of all men. Amid every diversity of polity and people, He is the one vivifying and unifying spirit.