Article August 6, 1910 Issue

FROM OUR EXCHANGES

with contributions from R. J. Campbell

[From "A Letter to All Churches" by the World's Missionary Conference, Edinburgh.]

Our survey has impressed upon us the momentous character of the present hour. We have heard from many quarters of the awakening of great nations, of the opening of long-closed doors, and of movements which are placing all at once before the church a new world to be won for Christ. The next ten years will in all probability constitute a turning-point in human history, and may be of more critical importance in determining the spiritual evolution of mankind than many centuries of ordinary experience. If those years are wasted, havoc may be wrought that centuries are not able to repair. On the other hand, if they are rightly used, they may be among the most glorious in Christian history. Just as a great national danger demands a new standard of patriotism and service from every citizen, so the present condition of the world and the missionary task demands from every Christian, and from every congregation, a change in the existing scale of missionary zeal and service, and the elevation of our spiritual ideal. The old scale and the old ideal were framed in view of a state of the world which has ceased to exist. They are no longer adequate for the new world which is arising out of the ruins of the old. It is not only of the individual or the congregation that this new spirit is demanded. There is an imperative spiritual demand that national life and influence as a whole be Christianized; so that the entire impact, commercial and political, now of the West upon the East, and now of the stronger races upon the weaker, may confirm, and not impair, the message of the missionary enterprise.

[Interior.]

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