It is not commerce which does this, it is Christianity. We are witnesses to it. Our ancestors, not many centuries ago, were mere rapacious savages, robbers in the forests, pirates on the sea; it was Christianity, brought to them, that lifted them into gladness, serenity, great purpose, great expectation and hope; and the new civilization in which we rejoice on either side, I will not say of the separating, of the uniting ocean, was founded on that New Testament, the folios of which, I believe, are still preserved in Corpus Christi College in Cambridge, and in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. Here is the basis of what has been the grandest, most illustrious, and most prophetic, in the recent history of mankind. Give the gospel freedom and it will everywhere show this power. Among the children and youth to whom it goes, among the mature and the strong, wheresoever it goes, it grapples conscience, it stimulates the heart. That one sentence, "The blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth us from all sin," is the profoundest truth, is the most persuasive and commanding appeal, ever addrest by an inspired apostle to the children of mankind; and wherever that is heard, sin is lost in penitence, and hope is lost in triumphant vision, and the glory of the world disappears before the glory immutable of the Son of God! Then we are to remember, certainly never is this to be forgotten, that the great imperishable motive, surpassing and dominating every other in missionary effort, is adoring love toward Christ, as central in the Scripture, glorified in history. No student of history, no observer of human experience, can fail to see that there is the sovereign passion possible to human nature; beside which the passion of love for a friend, for a country, for a business, for studies, may be auxiliary, but must be subordinate. There is the passion which has done the grandest things the world has ever known. There is the passion the vision of which interprets to us the strangest, sublimest pages of history. We have all felt it, I am sure, if we are Christian, in our measure, and at times; at the sacrament, perhaps; in those sabbaths of the soul of which Coleridge speaks, when the mind eddies instead of flowing onward; when we have been moved to a great effort for Him whom we love; most keenly, perhaps, when we have been in keenest sorrow, when the earth was as iron under our feet and the heavens as brass above our head, and we were all alone, yet not alone, for there stood beside us One in the form of the Son of Man, making luminous the dark! We have felt this love toward Christ; and when we have felt it we have known that no power could surpass or approach it in the intensity of its moving force, to every enterprise, great, difficult howsoever it might be by which He would be honored.