With the beginning of a new fiscal year there came to me a deep sense of dissatisfaction with the present status of our work--a sadness which almost touched the borders of discouragement at the decrease in attendance on our schools, and the lack of eager outreaching and aggressive endeavor on the part of us all--Superintendent, Teachers and Chinese helpers,--all alike. The methods, which had been so strikingly efficient in years past, seemed to be failing us now. We were settled down into them, as ruts; and, no matter how slow or hard or fruitless our movements along the old line, it seemed impossible to see what else to do, or how we could strike out into new paths, or plan any material change in the ordering of our campaign. Sometimes the question would arise; Is our work done? Has the Restriction Act, which for the present diminishes so greatly the incoming of fresh recruits for our schools, rung the knell of our missionary success? But to this question only one answer was possible. Even if, looking out from a stand-point of consummate Calvinism, we should venture to decide that the Lord's elect among the Chinese in California had all been gathered in, there were, nevertheless, these little flocks of Christ's own sheep and lambs already gathered that must not be left without a shepherd's care. Surely there is a duty that we owe to these, and to leave them untended in this wilderness would be to count ourselves in among the goats on the left hand of the Judge. But no Calvinism of any sort--and certainly not of our sort--gives us any basis for such an unchristian decision. We cannot shelter behind it, and think to retire with honor when we have as yet only skirmished on the edges of the field. For the Chinese heathenism of California remains to-day, so far as we can see, substantially a solid mass, without any fissure, though not without a scar. Many chips have been struck off from it, and for these we bless God; but the rock-like hardness of the Chinese heart remains substantially unbroken. Say that all our missions have reached, in the aggregate, 5,000 of these souls--there remain 65,000 virtually untouched. Suppose that we could count 1,000 born of God in all the missions (and this would be a large estimate) there remain 69,000 that are still aliens from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, without God and without hope in the world. To penetrate, somehow, this Chinese wall of prejudice, conceit and superstition, and pierce, with the sword of the spirit, the hearts intrenched behind it--to reach, somehow, the myriads not reached, and to bring them forth from the darkness that they love into the saving light that now they hate--this was the problem. You can look at it. I _have_ looked at it--till the sense of helplessness and uselessness threw me down upon my knees with my heart next door to despair. But there the still small voice was heard again, the voice of an