peoples and to have a profound expectation that their appropriative capacity for the riches of their Father has no known limit. It means that the human nature of a distant people is put on a level of possibility with our own; it means that we do not begrudge the acknowledgment of the moral and spiritual values which they have already attained; it means that we are drawn on by what through God's grace mankind may become.

For the individual this view involves that in the progressive enlargement of the self he shall learn not merely to tolerate, but to appreciate and admire. He will recognize that each of these peoples has an aspect which they reveal only to those they love.

We look at other peoples through the colored glasses of our own temperaments, but a hard and unsympathetic spirit can never disclose another's inner life. Will it not also take the metallic ring from much of our social service if we pause to acknowledge the diversity of gifts which God has bestowed upon his children? When it is no longer possible for us, with imagined superiority, to say, "We have no need of thee," then the very phrase, social service, is increasingly displaced by the words "Christian friendship." And how are we to maintain a keen and sensitive appreciation of the needs of others, apart from a lofty view of their capacities and a genuine reverence for their possibilities? This view, furthermore, will affect the education of our children, for it will remove one of the grounds for arrogant race pride and race prejudice. We will strive to instill in them the spirit of brotherhood as an attitude of mind made habitual through little courtesies to foreigners in street cars or through reactions to world news in the morning's paper.

For our nation it will mean emphasis upon international cooperation and mutual obligation rather than upon mere national exaltation. We have been all too slow in realizing that we have something to learn from the Orient, from Africa, from Latin America. A readiness to acknowledge the values in each of the other peoples ought to be one of the foundation stones of our larger internationalism. The opposite policy of resting back, complacent over our own standards, is what leads to national decay, while exaggerated racial vanity and unfounded national pretension form the very atmosphere of war. And if as a people we have any

thing to give to other nations, we will succeed better by fixing attention not on their weaknesses but rather on their capacities for growth. Surely modern philanthropy has worked out one lesson that must be taken over by the world workers-that if we would do good to another, whether an individual or a nation, we must see in that one a brother, and must emphasize that brother's possibilities. Not to believe in another people and give to them the resulting chance leads to imperialism and autocracy. We shall make little progress toward a world democracy until nations body forth an attitude of mutual respect and sympathy and confident expectation toward one another.

For the Church it will mean the popularization of the evidences of racial capacity amongst our citizens. Just as it was necessary for the Moravians in the early eighteenth century to prove to the Church that Negroes could be uplifted, so now is it necessary for the Church to show the world that backward peoples may become "new creatures." As long as men of big business have the underlying conviction that these peoples are really not worth while, how can we expect them to be interested in serious efforts for their rehabilitation? The facts of the social and religious results of missions must be popularized by the Church. The Church should make every effort to bring the press of Christian nations up to this Christian standard of the international mind. The papers should faithfully mirror the finest spirit and ideals of other peoples. They should be bridges across the Pacific and tunnels under the Atlantic, by means of which the highest interchange possible may eagerly be sought.

But it is not enough to refrain from dwelling on our international dislikes, nor even to become the dispensers of interracial admirations. As Christians with a fundamentally religious conviction of the gifts with which each member is endowed, we have a still more imperative duty. We must call forth and use every worthful faculty in fellow-members of the great society. Still more, as Christians in our corporate capacity as a Church, we must elicit and utilize the national gifts of other peoples, however despised and ignored by the unchristianized public opinion of dominant Western powers these peoples may now be. The Church should help the nations to see how many and how varied are the members that go to make up a body and how vital for the

common good are aptitudes which we do not possess. The Church should fire the imagination of mankind with the glorious vision of a democracy of God, into which shall have been brought the life and thought and talents of every section of the human race as transformed by Jesus Christ.

For the foreign missions of the Church, it means for some a change in attitude. Phillips Brooks came to a point where he saw that boys are white spotted black, not black spotted white. Something of this sort of change is needed in our attitude to many to whom we go as missionaries. A Japanese convert, speaking to an American audience, said, “If we heathen are but slightly better than gibbons or chimpanzees, the Christians may give up their mission work as a failure. It is because we know something of right and wrong, truth and falsehood that we are readily brought to the cross of Christ. I sincerely believe that the Christian mission based upon no higher motive than pity for heathen may have its support entirely withdrawn without much detriment either to the sender or the sent." More and more the prevalent attitude of the missionary to the people to whom he goes, sometimes from compulsion but more often from the more Christian spirit of our time, is that of friend and brother rather than that of patronizing superiority.

What an international opportunity the twenty-five thousand missionaries have, as they travel back and forth between the nations as so many shuttles weaving the fabric of good will! If they are true to their great privilege they will fill their reports, addresses, and books not alone with the worst and darkest aspects of the people amongst whom they live, but as true friends of both East and West will also mutually interpret the best of each to the other. It is the absence of this particular mark of a Christian mind in so much of the missionary literature of the past that drives many a leader to choose from amongst the supplementary geographical books of the common schools for a wholesome impartial picture of other lands. It is its presence in Miss Jean Mackenzie's "Black Sheep" which makes us long for more such books. Conscious only of possessing the most precious Treasure in all the world, we will seek to share that Treasure. But in sharing we will realize that we have this Treasure through no merit of our own, and that on distinctly lesser levels than that of Jesus there will be a true interchange.

TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION

I. What are the considerations for and against the following propositions: (a) that God has given ten talents to the whites but to the yellow and the black races only two and one? (b) that five and two and one talent men may be found fairly equally amongst all races?

2. Draw two lines, the relative length of which would roughly represent your idea of the relative racial attainments of Africa and America.

3. If all mankind has not the capacity for a boundless appropriation of the life of God, then what is the rationale of the Church's work abroad? If man has this capacity,

and God the will to help, what prevents the realization of the ideal?

4. How would you criticize this statement: "If a people be so low mentally as to be incapable of being trusted with leadership at the start, it is better to abandon them for the present and instead to concentrate on more strategic fields"? 5. In what sense was Israel a chosen people?

6. How would you illustrate and explain the following statement: "The Spirit of Christ will find less to do along certain lines in perfecting the adherents of some of the ethnic religions than He discovers in many of us, the products of generations of imperfectly applied Christianity"? (World Missionary Conference, 1910, vol. 9, p. 167).

7. Would the missionary enterprise today be more successful if it faced a blank and universal heathenism untouched by this ever-present witness in other religions? Why?

8. Does the recognition of truth and attainments in nonChristian peoples weaken or strengthen your missionary interest? Why?

9. What is there to criticize in the position that a missionary should have as his ideal to learn as well as to teach?

10. Formulate a statement of the attitude a missionary should take toward non-Christian religions.

II. In what specific ways may we show our realization that our work amongst other peoples must be a continuation of the work which the divine Spirit has already accomplished?

12. What would be the effect of introducing into the problems of present-day politics the recognition of distinctive national gifts?

CHAPTER III

Responsiveness to Human Need

If, however, these peoples have such great gifts and contributions as were indicated in the last chapter, why do we need to do anything for them? What is the use of worrying about their welfare? This brings us to the third element in the mind of a world Christian-the capacity for a sympathetic response to need.

~To test one's capacity for visioning the world's great needs, suppose we imagine ourselves high enough up and far enough away from our little globe to see it as a whole. Let us imagine we are looking back on old Earth from some distant point in space. Each day we could see the continents brought one after the other before our vision, as the earth slowly rotated beneath us. The really significant thing, however, would not be oceans and continents, rivers and valleys, but living individualities with their joys and sorrows, their aspirations and defeats, their racial attainments and deficiencies, their intergroup loyalties and their implacable mutual enmities.

This week, from cuch a distant vantage-point we are going to concentrate our thought in sympathetic meditation upon the human needs of the folk upon that ball. Each day as the globe revolves beneath us, bearing with it its myriad bits of life, we will fix our mind on one aspect of mankind's deficiency. It will be found that all human need of whatever kind can be comprehended under one or the other aspect of this sevenfold survey.' But while perforce in the few lines given to each day we must deal in generalizations, let us not forget to look closely and see the real flesh-and-blood men and women and children to whom these needs are sadly the poignant realities of their lives. No attempt has been made to give concrete illustrations in this chapter. The object is rather to survey the scope of human need. If we 1 See Albion W. Small, "General Sociology."