Unless the children of today are brought to the Master and trained for His service, the outlook is dark indeed for coming generations. If every child now living could be brought under Christian influences, receive a Christian education, and be sent out to live and work for Christ, what a marvelous transformation this world would experience! In a conspicuous place on the wall at a recent Sunday-School convention hung a banner with the words “Childhood is the Hope of the World,”--the same thought that was embodied in the remark of a prominent Japanese Christian, who said to a missionary, “The grown-up people are so ignorant and set in their ways, they will not become Christians, but _the hope is in the children_.”[95] “He who helps a child,” says Phillips Brooks, “helps humanity with a distinctness, with an immediateness, which no other help given to human creatures in any other stage of their human life, can possibly give again.” Here is a challenge to all who believe that the world needs hope, that humanity needs help, that God needs human agents to carry out His plans, that Christ needs the child! [Sidenote: Work for the children in awakening lands.] What is there for the child of today,--the man and woman of tomorrow,--to do in countries that are awaking out of age-long sleep? [Sidenote: Changes in Japan.] Sixty years ago Japan was in darkness. What great transformations have taken place since Commodore Perry sailed for Yedo Bay in November, 1852! As a commercial, military, and naval power Japan has been taking her place with the important nations of the earth. We have already learned that her educational system contains much that might well be copied in Western lands. The manner in which Japan is “catching up” with nations that have had centuries of advantage over her reminds one of the educational experimenters who claim that a child need not be bothered with mathematics until he is ten or twelve years old, and that he will then speedily “catch up” with children who have toiled over their mathematics since they were of kindergarten age. During the serious outbreak of bitter feeling in Japan regarding the proposed Alien Land Holding Bill pending in the California Legislature, a large reception was tendered in Tokyo to Dr. John R. Mott, Hamilton Wright Mabie and Dr. Peabody. In the course of his address, Count Okuma, who is not in any sense a Christian, remarked that diplomacy, the courts, and commercial interests were alike helpless to maintain peace on earth and good will among men. “The only hope,” he said, “is in the power of Christianity and in the influence of Christians to maintain peace and righteousness in the spirit of brotherly love.”[96] [Sidenote: Religious census in Imperial University.]