Christianity will introduce an entirely new element into the friendships of the Chinese, now too often based upon the selfish considerations suggested by the maxim of Confucius, "Have no friends not equal to yourself." Friendship is reckoned among the Five Relations and occupies a prominent place in Chinese thought as in Chinese life. But after all is conceded in regard to it which can be reasonably claimed, it remains true that its benefits are constantly alloyed by mutual insincerity and suspicion, and not infrequently by jealousy. This the Chinese themselves are ready to admit in the frankest manner; but as they have no experience of friendships which arise from conditions above and beyond those of the material issues of everyday life, no remedy for existing evils is ever thought of as possible. Those Chinese who have become intimate with congenial Christian friends, recognize at once that there is a flavour and a zest in such friendships not only unknown before, but absolutely beyond the range of imagination. Amid the poverty, barrenness, and discouragements of most Chinese lives, the gift of a wholly new relationship of the sort which Christianity imparts is to be reckoned among the choicest treasures of existence. The theory of the Chinese social organization is admirable and beautiful, but the principles which underlie it are utterly inert. When Christianity shows the Chinese for the first time what these traditional principles really mean, the theories will begin to take shape as possibilities, even as the bones of Ezekiel's vision took on flesh. Then it will more clearly appear how great an advantage the Chinese race has enjoyed in its lofty moral code. The Classical but not altogether intelligible aphorism that "within the Four Seas all are Brethren," requires the Christian teaching regarding a common Father to make it vital to Chinese consciousness. When once the Chinese have grasped the practical truth of the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man, the starlight of the past will have been merged into the sunlight of the future.