It will for the first time provide and develop for the daughters girl friendships, adapted to their long-felt but uncomprehended needs. The education of Chinese women is a condition of the renovation of the empire. No nation, no race can rise above the status of its mothers and its wives. How deftly yet how surely Christianity is beginning to plant its tiny acorns in the rifts of the granitic rock may be seen in the surprising results already attained. When the present isolated and initiatory experiments shall have had time to bring forth fruit after their kind, it will be clearly perceived that a new and an Imperial force has entered into the Chinese world. Christianity wherever introduced tends to a more rational selection of partners for its sons and daughters than has ever been known before. In place of the mercenary considerations which alone find place in the ordinary practice of the Chinese, it naturally and inevitably leads to the choice of Christian maidens for daughters-in-law, and Christian youths for sons-in-law. It attaches weight to character, disposition and acquirements instead of to wealth and to social position alone. A Christian community is the only one in China where it is possible to learn with certainty all important facts with regard to those who may be proposed for matrimonial engagements, because it is only in such a community that dependence can be placed upon the representations of third parties. As Christian communities come more and more to distinct self-consciousness, more and more care will be exercised in making matches. Christians are indeed the only Chinese who can be made to feel that caution in this direction is a religious duty. The result of this process continued for an extended period will produce by "natural selection" a distinctly new type of Chinese, physically, intellectually, and morally the superiors of all types about them and therefore more fitted to survive. Chinese customs will not be rashly invaded, but the ultimate tendency will be to postpone marriage to a suitable age, to consider the preferences of the principal parties--so far as they may have any--and to make wedlock a sacred solemnity instead of merely a social necessity. Christianity will make no compromise with polygamy and concubinage, but will cut the tap-root of a upas-tree which now poisons Chinese society wherever its branches spread. Christianity will gradually revolutionize the relations between the young husband and his bride. Their common intellectual and spiritual equipment will have fitted them to become companions to one another, instead of merely commercial partners in a kettle of rice. The little ones will be born into a Christian atmosphere as different from that of a non-Christian household as the temperature of Florida from that of Labrador. These forces will be self-perpetuating and cumulative.