CONDITION OF CHRISTIAN MISSIONS.
By Rev. A. T. Pierson
AMID all our congratulations we must not forget our humiliation, for while completing the first century of modern missions, it is only the first. The evangelistic activity of the first centuries gave place to secularism and selfishness. A thousand years of the Dark Ages succeeded, during which Christianity scarcely survived. The Lutheran Reformation revived apostolic doctrine, but did not revive apostolic activity and evangelism. The church had to wait three centuries more before she recognized her duty and debt to a lost world. And even now the bulk of Christian disciples do not feel their individual responsibility for the lost. We do work by proxy. We erect great societies and boards, and by them girdle the world with a net-work of missionary organizations, and content ourselves with trifling gifts and sending forth some 5,000 or 6,000 men and women, while the converts from heathenism furnish five or six times as many workers as all Christendom! We give ten millions of dollars a year to foreign missions, while in London alone enough wealth is buried in ornaments, jewelry, and silver plate to carry the gospel around the world in ten years.—Rev. A. T. Pierson.