day. At night we had a still larger congregation than in the morningmen not able to find even standing room. I saw we were going to have great difficulty in lighting that building. Candles were a dollar apiece and were very scarce; kerosene was $20 a gallon. Í said to the men: "Now, you will have to help me out in this. Blow out the candle you would have used in your cabin to-night, and light it here." In that way they lighted our building all that winter at a good deal of sacrifice to themselves.

Under those circumstances we commenced our service, but after a winter of work our building burned down, with a loss of a thousand dollars, for which I was responsible. We organized on Easter Day, 1898, the First Presbyterian Church of Dawson, with fifty-nine charter members. To our great pride and joy, seven of those charter members were women, for good Christian women were very scarce in the Klondike. The first thing those good ladies did was to organize a Ladies' Aid Society; they gave a supper to pay off the debt, charging the prevailing price, $3.50 a meal. When the rush came in we paid off the debt. We made that church self-supporting, and it has continued a strong, self-supporting church ever since. We built a church at the cost of $3,000, paying for it; built a hospital at the cost of some $5,000. Then I turned over the mission to the Canadian Presbyterians, and started the Presbytery of the Yukon. I organized another mission at Council, and that has been in charge of a theological student. At Teller we opened a mission in charge of a good Presbyterian elder until we could get a minister to carry on the work.

But you cannot always measure the effect of preaching the Gospel in Alaska or elsewhere by church organizations or even by professions of

Christianity. There is no people in the world that needs the safeguarding of precious lives from all manner of loose morals as in those camps. When the saloon is the only place to congregate, when there is no restraint of law or order, and no restraint of Christianity, men will drift with the tide. How often in our prayer-meeting have men said, with tears in their eyes: "If it was not for this church or this mission, I would be just drifting with the crowd." The Gospel is the only thing that can correct the evils of society and the only thing that can safeguard those precious lives.

We do not need sympathy for physical hardships, but there are trials. much greater. All manner of vice marched with that company. I heard the miners say: "God does not exist here in the Klondike." And by the oaths that sounded from lips unused to them before; by the vast moral loss that many men met with; by the sad fall of many a professing Christian into all sorts of vice-by those falls you gauge the moral stamina of a man. The saddest part is to see the wickedness of those who have been trained in ways of Christianity.

We have many vices there-all the vices and lusts; but of all, I believe the most universal, deadly, dangerous, and soul-killing is that mad lust for gold. I know nearly all the men who "struck it rich" at Bonanza and Eldorado and other rich creeks in the Klondike, and to nine out of ten of those men their gold dust has brought nothing but trouble and misery, for they knew not how to get any real good out of it. I knew one young man who was brought up in a Christian home, and who came there a big, stalwart, lovable fellow. Three months later he sold a claim that he had staked for $25,000. In two weeks he had not a cent of it left; one wild spree, and it was gone. A crowd of

those gambling and confidence men flocked around him, and kept him giving and treating the town, and having, as he thought, "a big time." The outcome of it was attempted suicide as he went back to work for wages on the claim that he had sold.

One thing that impressed me was the futility of a mere secular education to safeguard a life from moral failure and ruin. I knew many college-bred men, some of them educated in Oxford and Cambridge, in England, or in Yale, Harvard, Princeton, who are now saloon-keepers, barkeepers, superintendents of a faro table, or the mere hangers-on and stokers for saloons and gambling halls. The worst savages I have ever known-the most filthy, hopeless, irreclaimable savages -were educated, college-bred men from Christian communities. But if the man is strong in character, and especially if he has that strength that is from above, he becomes tenfold stronger and more noble in the face of such temptations. No more lovable and admirable men exist anywhere than the men of those camps in the north. The hard rubbing that destroys clay, polishes the diamond.

In the rough logging camps, and away up in dark little camps up those creeks, I have met men ready to discuss any question. The brightest con

gregation I have ever ministered to and the hungriest for the Gospel was in Alaska. Some of those men come regularly every Sunday from fifteen to twenty miles to hear the sermon. Many of them had not heard a sermon in months, and thousands of men scattered in the wild camps of Alaska have not a chance all winter to hear the Gospel. One old-timer, whom I had known seventeen or eighteen years before at Fort Wrangel, said he had not been to church since he saw me last. He came merely for music, but presently he began to be touched; he began to study the Bible; he joined the Bible class; and at last that old "fortyniner" got up to give his testimony in the rough language and slang of the camp. He said: "You all know me. I've lived the life of the camps, and I had no thought of what was going to come hereafter. I've been in every camp on the coast, from California to the Arctic, and I've had all sorts of luck; but, partners, this is the first time that I've ever struck it real rich." I never knew the joy of service until I experienced the service of preaching the Gospel to those miners of the north. The Missionary Review of the World.

NOTE. We hope soon to supplement this paper with one describing the introduction of Methodist Missions into the Yukon.-ED.

HE late Cecil Rhodes, the great empire empire builder, once said: "If there be a God, I believe He wants me to help carry out His purpose in history by painting as much. of the map of Africa as I can a British red." What we need as Christian workers, members of the Church of Christ, is a clear vision that God wants us, as His disciples, to paint this great land with which we are identified a Christian white.

There are conditions, hindrances and opposing influences to this work, and these constitute the problems of our home mission work. There are the thousands of people that are coming to us, scattering over wide areas of our country, requiring greatly multiplied agencies in men and homes and churches; there are the institutions of the devil-the licensed liquor traffic, the brothel and the gambling den; there are infidelity, agnosticism, atheism and materialism, with its greedy mammonism and blight of deadly worldliness.

As we look at this great array we are led to ask: Who is sufficient for the solving of these problems? Who is sufficient for these things? The pessimist says it cannot be done; the problems must remain unsolved; the work cannot be overtaken; the oncoming tide of materialism is too much for the Church; things are getting worse and worse; it is impossible.

We, however, are not of that school. We believe in God; we have faith in Christ, the great Mediator; we believe that He will no more desert His

people in their great spiritual need today than He did that hungry, famishing, fainting multitude in the desert place nineteen hundred years ago, when, with five loaves and two small fishes, He fed five thousand souls. Impossible! Napoleon, at the battle of Lodi, ordered an advance across the long, narrow bridge that was swept by the Austrian artillery. One of his staff turned to him and said: "Sire, that is impossible." With flashing eye Napoleon turned to him and said: "That word is not French; go forward," and forward moved the French host, carrying the bridge and capturing the Austrian artillery, and the Plains of Lombardy were open to Napoleon's army.

And in this great movement of the evangelization and Christianizing of this great land, with the marching orders of the great Commander-inChief; with an omnipotent and omniscient God behind and above us, in His name we will go forth to the task and laugh at impossibilities, and shout: "It shall be done." We, however, must recognize the part we have to play in this great drama in order to its success. Seventy years ago, when the rush into the Western States began, the wisest men of the Republic began to doubt how long the original stock of America could bear the interfusion of elements alien to their history and to the faith of their ancestry. The conviction was then often expressed that the case was hopeless on any theory of their national growth which did not take into account the eternal decrees of God. Good men were hopeful only because they had faith in the reserves of might which God held secret from human view.

Students of the history of that country in those days will have read how such men as Dr. Lyman Beecher, of Ohio, and Dr. Wm. Blackburn, of Missouri, used to return from their conflicts with the multiform varieties of Western infidelity to thrill the hearts of Christian assemblies at the East with their pictures of Western greatness and Western perils.

The ideas which these veterans of the platform kept before the minds of the people were three: The magnitude of the West in geographical area; the rapidity with which it was filling up with social elements, many of them hostile to each other, but nearly all of them conspiring against Christian institutions; and the certainty that Christianity must go down in the struggle if Eastern enterprise was not prompt in seizing upon the then present opportunity, and resolute in preoccupying the land for Christ.

Again and again these men said on these Eastern platforms: "Now is the nick of time. In matters which reach into eternity, now is always the nick of time. One man now is worth a hundred fifty years hence. One dollar now is worth a thousand then. Let us be up and doing before it is too late."

These eloquent appeals for help failed to arouse the Eastern people as they ought to have been aroused, and the result is, we are told, the Church has never been able to overtake the ground which was lost in consequence of their failure to respond.

History is repeating itself. Instead of the Western States it is now Western Canada. Our turn has come. We have, according to careful estimate, two hundred and fifty million acres of wheat-producing land, and only about sixty million under cultivation. Millions of acres still vacant waiting for settlers; people desiring to be settled turning their eyes toward our great prairies, "boundless and beautiful,"

and hundreds of thousands coming to take possession of these acres and beginning the task of home and fortune making.

As we look upon this great inrush of population from the standpoint of the Church and the Christian ministry, we surely cannot fail to see a great wide open door of opportunity. When we think of the power of environment, if we have the conception we ought to have of our exalted calling and privilege, we shall bless God for the splendid opportunity afforded us in having a part in making the conditions of such a kind that the new settlers will be influenced on the side of right, of Christ, and the Church.

"The rudiments of Empire here are plastic yet and warm,

The chaos of a mighty world is rounding into form."

And the form is going to be largely what the Christian people of the country choose to make it.

The new settler upon his first arrival is in a frame of mind to be easily won for God or evil. He leaves his former home and all his associations, his friendships and fellowships. He comes into a new country. He looks for new surroundings. He expects to adapt himself to new conditions of society and to swing in with what he finds. He acts according to this expectation. If he is met with a warm-hearted Christian greeting, he takes that to be the new order and is predisposed to respond to it. If he is met by godless conditions, if he finds the community careless of the Sabbath, absentees from church worship, or perhaps without the opportunity of enjoying it, he assumes that this is to be the atmosphere of his new surroundings, and he is inclined to take things as he finds them. But when once he has settled down to these conditions, all his predispositions will be against change.

We must, therefore, keep ahead of this opportunity. Just a little too late will mean, in many instances, too late for ever. The Methodist Church in this land and in this work has a great responsibility, a responsibility which should drive us to our knees, asking for the sight of a seer's discernment, of power to grip what we behold, and wisdom to organize and direct a mighty campaign for God. Our Western country just now is in that condition which Edmund Burke described as "a perilous and dancing balance." And the question of the hour is, Which way shall the balance turn? and that will depend largely on how we see, and how we seize, the situation before us.

In the present condition of affairs one is reminded of the judgment which has been expressed by almost all the great generals of the world, from Julius Cæsar to the generals of modern times, that in every decisive battle there is a moment of crisis on which the fortunes of the day turn. The commander who seizes and holds that ridge of destiny wins the victory. The conflict of the world's salvation and evangelization partakes of the same character. Our national salvation demands in supreme exercise certain military virtues: "Vigilance in watching opportunity; tact and daring in seizing upon opportunity; force and persistence in crowding opportunity to its utmost of possible achievementthese are the martial virtues which must command success. Christian enterprise for the moral conquest of this land needs to be conducted with the self-abandonment which determined men would throw into the critical moment in the critical battle of the critical campaign for a nation's endangered life."

What the campaign in Pennsylvania was to the Civil War, what the battle of Gettysburg was to that campaign,

what Waterloo was to another nation on another occasion-such is the present opportunity to the Christian civilization of this country. Wherever you turn in this great land you are confronted by the same element of crisis in the outlook upon the future. And, as one has said, "Everything seems, to human view, to depend on present dissolving chances. Whatever can be done at all must be done with speed. The building of great states depends on one decade. The nationalizing of alien races must be the work of a period which, in a nation's life, is but an hour."

The elements we work upon and the elements we must work with are fast precipitating themselves in fixed institutions and consolidated character. Nothing will await our convenience. Nothing is indulgent to a dilatory policy. Nothing is tolerant of a somnolent enterprise.

What we ought to do, and do quickly, is to plant ourselves in the strategic points of this country.

The first and most important place is in this city of Winnipeg. We ought to take a leaf from the book of Old Country Methodism, and in this city plan a mission equal to the one conducted in Manchester or in Edinburgh. A centre near the C.P.R. station, from which missionary work on a scale which has never been attempted in this land before, ought to be inaugurated. I believe from such a mission untold blessing would go out throughout the length and breadth of this great land.

Methodism ought to furnish men for the hour; young men who will see the opportunity for doing grandly for God and country, and who, while they would never dream of giving themselves to the work for salaries' sake, will willingly go for the Saviour's sake. We are engaged in what Lord Bacon called the heroic work of

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