MISSIONS, HOME AND FOREIGN.
No CHURCH is a truly missionary church, no church is a live Christian church, which neglects either home or foreign missions. The Spirit of Christ constrains him who possesses it to labor for all. No church or Christian who is able can shirk responsibility of foreign missions by saying, "There are heathens enough at home." There are, of course, heathens enough and too many everywhere, but God has called us, in Christ, debtors to those afar off as well as those who are near. But God will never call us to foreign fields till we are willing to work in home fields. In fact, the best preparation for foreign work is home work. In other words, the best preparation to fit one to labor for souls is to labor for souls, and it is less expensive to prove the gift of the Master at home than it is abroad. But what great need is there of work at home? This is what a writer says of moral conditions in Chicago:— Six thousand saloons, with a daily income of $316,000, and employing about 31,600 persons. In one saloon were counted, on a Sunday evening, 524 men; within two hours 480 more entered, until they stood about the gambling-tables six deep. Thirty-one theaters, most of them open on Sunday. At seventeen of these, on a Sunday evening, were counted 17,160 men between the ages of fifteen and forty-five, to say nothing of older and younger men and women. Houses of impurity abound. In a single ward there were counted 312, with 1,708 inmates. A thousand men are engaged in alluring men into these dens. Fully 50,000 men—one in nineteen of the men of the city—are directly engaged in public places of resort whose influence is demoralizing and tends to crime. The school census gives Chicago 873,247 young people under twenty-one years of age, of whom 594,343 are under fourteen years, and 626,516 are between six and twenty-one years. We have about 182,000 Protestant Sunday-school members, leaving us nearly 700,000 young people under twenty-one years not in Sunday-schools, or enough to make 1,400 Sunday-schools of 500 each.13 Robert E. Speer gives us these statistics concerning the country at large:— Of the 76,622,250 people of the United States, according to the census of 1900, 6,324,702, ten years of age and over, or 13.3 per cent, could not read and write. But in Louisiana the percentage of illiteracy was 45.8 per cent, and among the negroes of New Mexico 80.6 per cent. And the same census gave the total church-membership of the country as 20,612,806, of whom 6,257,871 were Roman Catholics. There is room enough for the church's growth. Have you done anything to promote it? Have you been the means, during the past year, of bringing one into the church? "Of the 7,516 Presbyterian churches, 2,141 went through the entire year without a solitary addition to their membership by confession of faith. Almost, if not quite, as appalling, is the fact that of the remaining 5,375 churches, 2,599, or almost one-half, reported five or less additions each; for the 2,141 may be said to represent the dead churches of the denomination which long ago should have been swept off the list,—churches without pastors, organization, membership, loyalty, or life of any sort, stranded and extinct. But the 2,599 embrace the large body of ordinary or typical churches, outside of favorable conditions and of leadership quality. Of the 2,766 churches receiving five or more, 1,171 received ten or less, leaving only 1,605 that reported over ten accessions during a whole year. No one could claim that this is a healthy spiritual condition." Yet this is probably illustrative of the condition in other denominations also. Surely there is work to do at home. But if the church of Christ were awake to home conditions, she would multiply her foreign workers by a hundred. It is time now to work.