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money planted Methodism in Ohio and in Minnesota, in many places about 25 per cent. of all our Sunday school scholars come under this head, and we take the majority of them into our Church and compute this average upon them.

and in all the Western States except Ohio, and did not he know that the mission work we are doing out there is building up the churches that are now delighting the heart of Chaplain McCabe by their pledges and their fulfilment toward the million?

Again our cause is often disparaged by comparing our work with that of other denominations worth ten times as much per capita as we are, who have had heavy endowments to which I have already referred, and do not bear the burden of current expenses that we do, and who have a different method of computing from ours. I am going to prove in the Christian Advocate, (and that master of statistical investigation, the Rev. J.W.Young, is going to give me the thunder), that if we adopt the method of computation some of the other churches adopt, our results will be fully equal to theirs.

Our cause is disparaged by men going up and down and saying "We Methodists do not give on an average, fifty cents per member." I will undertake in closing to show that from the creation of the world, to this very hour in this spot, there never was anything more absurd and slanderous than this computation of an average on our membership.

In the first place, two per cent. of our church members are aged and indigent men and women, supported by the Church. I was a pastor for 25 years in New Hampshire, Michigan, Connecticut and New York; I administered, directly or indirectly, the Poor Fund in all of them, and I affirm that two per cent. is a small estimate of the absolute number of indigent, worthy men and women.

In the next place this membership of ours includes pretty nearly half a million colored people in the South, poor, very poor, most of them, and what they have is little of it in cash. They are all in the average and this computation includes them.

Again, every year there is a varying number that for that year are totally disqualified from giving. There is the poor mechanic that has had to bury three children in one year. I have followed three at one time, with the fourth dying in the house, to Greenwood. Afterwards the afflicted father said to me, "I cannot give you anything for missions this year. I can hardly keep my pew in the church." Now there is a varying but large number of this sort every year. Again when the mills shut down in Pittsburgh, the workers cannot get anything; when the factories shut down in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, they cannot get anything, and yet you compute this miserable average on the membership, including this large though not uniform number!"

Besides, I want you to consider that there is an immense number of Sunday school scholars who are in our membership, who have no Methodist parents at all. They have come into our schools, been converted under our system, and they are not producers but conI am informed upon very good authority that

sumers.

And now want to bring in another very important fact with regard to this matter. Here is a man that is in pretty good circumstances. He has a wife and four or five children. He earns the money; he could not earn it perhaps if he had not his wife; but she is not a producer in any sense that the wage-worker is a producer. She is just as important, but the money is earned by him, unless she has to work for a living also. Now then, you undertake to compute an average and include that man and his wife and children all in the membership! You compute the average when the money comes from his wages.

Let me say it is not possible to find in the history of this world a set of men, all things considered, that have given as much for the cause of missions as the producers in Methodism have given. In my first missionary collection I raised $80, of which I gave $20 myself; and this came out of the few producers in my congregation, and cost them more sacrifice than it would an ordinary prosperous Methodist to give the whole $80 himself.

I make no apology for meanness; there is considerable of it in the Methodist Church.

Nineteen years ago next Christmas in the Sands street Church, the first meeting after Moses F. Odell, that marvellous friend of Missions, the first time after they had a Christmas anniversary subsequent to his death I told the following story which was true then, and has been true ever since. I knew a man that made the most eloquent prayer that I ever heard for a layman, that the Gospel might spread throughout the world. (I say a layman, because I have heard Mr. Spurgeon pray, and Henry Ward Beecher pray, and never have I heard such prayers as I used to from Mr. Beecher, when he was not obstructed by peculiar views of the Gospel; and I cannot put any layman up there; but alas, I am speaking of times long since past.) This prayer was eloquent, and the next day I asked the old man who made it and he was worth $40,000, for his annual subscription for missions. He put his hand into his pocket and gave me a Mexican quarter of a dollar with a hole in it.

I have known a wealthy woman to come up, and ask me to take her "mite," 40 cents. By her side was a clerk in a grocery store who gave me $5.

I am not an apologist for meanness, but the way to break open a mean man's heart is not by scolding. The way to advance this cause is to say the Methodists have done nobly, for the most of them have done so.

In the presence of Bishop Baker, many years ago, to the astonishment of everybody, a certain man got up, and said: "May I say a word ?" "Certainly," said the Bishop, thunderstruck, for he knew the man. Said he, "I have been in the habit of giving as God has prospered me. I have given to the cause of missions from

one to two dollars every year since I have been connected with the Church, except one, and that year I took a religions paper which cost me $2.50, and I only gave half a dollar to the cause; but when I see these plain men giving their money, and these children, I cannot resist it. Put me down for $4.50." That was a clear gain of $2.50. Not much, but the next year he rose up and said he would be one of twenty to give $500.

If you can find me an instance of a man who said, "I know the Methodists are very stingy when compared with other denominations, that they don't give an average of 40 cents, but they are rich, and selfish, and mean, and therefore, put me down for $50," then I will join the pessimistic company who think the way to advocate the cause is to depreciate what the Fathers have done and the sons are doing.

You have all heard of Dr. Ray Palmer. A thousand years after he is dead, the Christian Church will be singing the grand hymn he wrote, "My faith looks up to thee." Fifty years ago, Ray Palmer preached a sermon in which he drew this picture: "I fancy that I am coming back to the world five hundred years from now," and then, he said, "I shall see Japan open to the Gospel." Well, I had the honor of being present at Dr. Palmer's golden wedding, and he is alive now and writing hymns; and we have an Anglo-Japanese college and a wonderful work in Japan.

Praise, gratitude, love and hope are the notes to be struck. No general on the eve of battle ever said, "Men you are short of ammunition, your rations have given out. Most of you are cowards and sluggards." Away with averages improperly computed, and statements that never move the mean, but make the liberal cringe and even tend to harden them!

The Fathers did wondrously, and wherever and whenever the cause is properly presented, their children (always allowing for a few exceptions), will give liberally. (Applause.)

Bishop Hurst was then introduced by Bishop Harris, and spoke as follows, taking for his subject "The Historical Obligation of American Christianity for the World's Conversion: "

Bishop Hurst. I was expecting to share the triumph of this hour from a distance, and so wrote to Dr. McCabe; but I received from him a peremptory telegram-from this knight who is going to spread for us a Cloth of a Million threads of Gold-that I must be here. And I have obeyed, though with most unwilling steps.

Mr. Chairman, I shall speak of the American obligation for the world's conversion. It has not been, as yet, four centuries since Columbus revealed to the world this western continent, and laid it as a gift at the feet of Queen Isabella of Spain. She had sold her jewels to buy the three little vessels which turned their prows to ward these unknown western lands. And yet, within that brief time this great population has grown to its present dimensions. The land has been overspread with

industry and thrift. But more than all, there has been built upon this western continent, the greatest wonder of the modern world,-this vast and invincible ecclesiastical life of American Protestantism.

Whence did the costly materials come which were here combined to rear this wondrous edifice? They were drawn from all the better, but persecuting, nations of Europe. They came from fair France, and no purer current has ever entered into our American civilization than the warm, strong, loving current of the Huguenots of France. They came from the Piedmontese valleys, the Waldenses, whose rich martyr blood made purple the glaciers of the Alps. Many found the transition short from the chill air of those glaciers, and the mausoleum which they reared there, to the warmer atmosphere and glorious temple of Heaven.

They came to us from Holland-first owners of this Island where we sing and pray, and hope, and are going to make offerings to the broad distant world to night. Yes, they came to this free land from the cruelties of Alva and his employer, Charles V. Their very memory reared a Republic behind them, while they helped to rear here this grand Republic. And that blood entered into the veins which have been throbbing here, fought at Lexington, and won at last in all our wars, and helped receive the surrender at Appomattox Court House.

They came from Scandinavia, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish,-they all came here: men in whose veins the purple current was just as pure, and thrilled just as fervently as in the arm of Gustavus Adolphus, when, in the hour of victory at Lutzen he exchanged the darkness of earth for the light before the throne. They, the children of the old Vikings, turned their boats out from the western fiords of Norway toward our coast, and gave the treasure of their grand vitality into our American life.

The Germans we cannot forget. Edward A. Freeman, the English historian, says truly that the Saxon has lived on three rivers-the Weser, the Thames, and the Hudson.

And so he has. We know very well that Wm. Penn went all through Germany, soliciting immigration, and found it well. So the Germans came to this country, after the ploughshare of the 30 years war had been struck deeply into the soil by Tilly and Wallenstein. There came those who escaped martyrdom, from England and Scotland, and even Ireland. Ireland was largely Protestant then, compared with what it is now. But when she gets her parliament, as I hope she will, then we shall have hope again for Protestantism in Ireland.

Why did all these currents flow hither? Not for yellow gold like the conquerors of the southern half of our continent-Pizarro and Cortez and the rest. They came for the liberty of conscience, for the holy right to worship God as their hearts and convictions ordained. And now, out of this pure combination has grown up this wonderful ecclesiastical life. Why, I ask, have we grown into this symmetrical shape of to-day?

What has come of this outflow of European blood in the most exalted hour of all its history? The impulse to carry the Gospel back to the home where we were born. This is why we turn our faces back to Europe and the other lands again.

I declare, boldly, as a reader of history, that this phenomenon is the most marvellous chapter inthe whole history of mordern times. Look at it clearly, we who are living here in this land of Protestantism are deliberately and persistently sending missionaries and planting missions all over the continent of Europe. Why so? It is the child, full grown into his manhood, into judgment, into a conviction that the needs of home are the supreme needs of the world, who turns his face from the field of his love and the birthplace of his soul, where he has won his victories, back to the old fireside where his fathers lived.

A German preacher was preaching in Cincinnati, back in the forties. There sat before him a young infidel taking notes of the German sermon to which he was listening, that he might go and report it to his infidel club. As the young man began to write, his pencil began to grow unsteady, and it fell. The young man was helpless. He became a convert to the Christian faith. In a

few weeks he united with the little German church of the preacher of that evening. In a short time he came to New York and stood before the Missionary Board and begged them to send him as a missionary to Germany. The Missionary Board said: "We cannot afford it; we do not believe in it; it seems an unreasonable thing."

But he persisted, and won. When they saw the fire in Jacoby's eyes, they had to send him; and he went over there less than forty years ago, and planted that noble German Mission. Thank God, the preacher of that evening, Wm. Nast, is still living, and celebrates now the 50th anniversary of his career as the planter of German Methodism in America.

What is our German field to-day? It stretches from the North Sea down to Lake Geneva, and our ministers of the Germany and Swiss Conference have only to take a neighborly walk in this same Geneva, to shake hands with their brothers of the Italian Conference, which stretches from the base of Vesuvius in the South, to Geneva in the North.

Do you ask what is the origin of our other European Missions? It is of the same fine fibre. The Danes have come to our Missionary Board and have applied for work in Denmark, and have simply gone home with their gold of the Gospel? The Swedes have done the same. Hence we have in the Scandinavian Peninsula a vast net work of missions. It was my privilege to preach a year ago in a Swedish city, when the Pastor of the State church, near by our own church, was present, and, giving me a warm grasp of the hand, said: "I thank God that you are here, and I wish you God speed."

So, when we go back to Norway we are only the latest descendants of the old Vikings. We are going home

to the fireside, to the place whence many came who have helped to rear our civilization. It is the child with ancestral attachments, going back to see the good old people at home, and carrying to them the word of life.

As our vessel skirted the Norwegian coast, when we came opposite the memorable place of Stavanger, I saw a monument on the shore, with thirty smaller ones for a fence, about it. These thirty were the memorials of thirty kings, and in the middle was the monument of Harold the fair-haired.

Harold sought the hand of a beautiful lady. She said to him, "N; you are only one of the twenty-nine kings of Norway. I will be queen of all Norway, or I shall be no queen at all. I will be a great queen, not a small one." Said he: "I will never cut my hair until I have slain them all, and brought all Norway under one crown, and that my own." She said: "I will wait for you if it takes a life time." And so she waited, and he laid his plans. It required ten long years to get them ripe, and in that one great sea fight off Stavanger, between one rising and setting sun, he slew all the contending kings, and then the lady became his queen, and he the one king of the first united Norway.

Sɔ will it be to Norway in a higher sense-the union of all the people in the truth of God. The American mission in that country extends from Landesnas to Trondhjem, and our churches are laboring to bring all people beneath the one crown of our great King.

In Sweden, a member of the Methodist Episcopal ministry is just now a member of the Swedish parliamentRev. J. M. Erikson. He was elected on the prohibition ticket in the heart of Stockholm-the kind of ticket which elects in Sweden, and sometime may elect here. (Applause). But it never cost that Methodist minister a five cent postage stamp for his whole campaign. There he is to day-an honor to you and to our common Methodism.

Do you ask why are we in Italy? None of our missions is more important than Italy. If we had not sent Dr. Vernon to Italy to gather about him the noble men who are co-operating with him, who have grown up on the field, we should have to do it to-morrow. The thing is a spiritual enforcement. We would be compelled to do it. God has ordered it, and we could not do otherwise. It is a necessity. Gilbert Haven saw it. Call him a fanatic if you please, or an enthusiast-they always did it, and he always smiled, but he had the prophet's vision, and saw what was going to be, and must be, in the Italy of the coming years.

Look at Bulgaria. I will confess that we have only a few dozen people to day in that land, after thirty years of giving, and faith, and sacrifice. Have those Bulgarians not proven by uniting as brothers on both sides the Balkans, within the last six weeks, that they are worthy of every dollar that you have given? I wish we had a dozen men to send by the first steamer to Bulgaria, to enter that land afresh, and seize anew upon that country, and other parts of the Danubian Principalities. Like

England, for her troops, American Methodism must have an open way for our steady caravan of missionaries to our Indian Empire.

Now, Mr. President, this is simply a sketch of the high spiritual and historical necessity for our missions in Eu rope. We are there by a deep filial devotion. We are the children who were driven by a holy impulse to go back again to the ancestral home, and place in the hands of our brothers, the treasure of the Gospel which we have found in this new land.

Behold

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Do we, There

Now look at our mission fields further away. our great Indian Empire. "Well," you will say, cannot apply that principle to the India field." as children, owe India anything? Of course not. is no bond of relationship." Do not be quite so fast. There was a time when Greece consisted of only a few barbarous villages. Long, long centuries before "the blind old man of Scio's rocky isle," went with his harp through those villages; long before the fabled wolf was born which became the nurse of Romulus and Remus; far back in the time when the old Pelasgic race lived in Italy, when they did not know what cement was, and could only put the stones to gether for rude walls without anything to join them; long before there was a Goth in mother Europe, there was history in process in the vast continent of India.

The Teutonic family was lying back there, in its Aryan cradle, getting ready for its battle fields over all continents and in all ages. Our Aryan ancestors looked down into the valley of the Ganges, went southward, drifted eastward, and carried with them the same Sanskit speech which is to this day, the substratum of your present nervous, pungent Anglo-Saxon tongue. In the high table-lands of India, and in the valleys of the Indus and the Ganges, was nursed the Aryan race, and when our noble William Butler went back to India, thirty years ago, he was only a young Aryan boy taking the Gospel back to the land of his ancestors.

So in planting missions around the globe, even American Methodism; we are only filling our premeditated destiny, and giving the truth to those who gave us life. The very Hindu is our brother, and we are his keeper.

There is not a land to which we have sent a missionary, to which we are not under obligation. If Paul could say as he wrote to the Romans, "I am a debtor to the Jew and the Greek," the American Methodist must say, "I am a debtor to the Swede, the Norwegian, the Dane, the German, the Frenchman, the Italian, the very Hindu,-I am a debtor to them all, because all of them have sent their life into our life, and made us what we are to-day."

There are four countries in Europe that we have for gotten in our missionary appropriations. When Dr. McCabe gets his two millions-for that sum is sure to come annually, as certainly as to-morrow's sun-our children will wonder why we made the figure so low, as one million for 1886. They will wonder why our two heroic secretaries, Reid and McCabe, were so modest at

this juncture. Dr. Buckley tells us that our Chaplain is modest, and we have the proof in his present low figure of a million.

We must send the Gospel to Spain. That is the land that first lifted this new Altantis out of the depths of the western seas. Before many years shall have elapsed, we must send a dozen missionaries there. The fires of

martyrdom we cannot forget. We know, too, very well that from Spain we have about one-third the territory of these United States. Florida, the entire Mississippi valley and the whole territory from the Mississippi river to the Pacific ocean was bought for a few millions of francs by Thomas Jefferson from Napoleon Bonaparte. We owe Spain the Gospel in return for broad Give us time and we shall have to make an appropriation for that land.

acres.

Then, too, we must send missionaries to the five millions in Roumania, and thus open the pathway from Bulgaria into the heart of Russia. We must plant another force in Greece, with Athens as our centre. We must send another to Palestine, with Jerusalem as the base of operations. That will complete our network in Europe, and the highway will be open for India. This will take time, and larger giving, but the day is sure to come.

In Europe, and all over India, they have caught the breath of this inspiration. We have in these landstaking Europe and India together-a membership of perhaps thirty thousand, and four hundred ordained ministers. I do not mention the lay ministry, for they are true Methodists, and believe in every part of our church economy.

If we should grow weak in this land on the subject of total abstinence, or the desecration of the Sabbath, or the class meetings, or the lay ministry, or anything else that we planted in our genesis, when God planted us— they would come over here and teach us the Gospel that we first taught them, and the polity that we first laid down for them. There is a wide ministry there, and a broad constituency, that are looking to us for help.

Many of them have gained republican ideas from us, You would not hear a word to-day of the disestablishment of the State Church in England but for the American example. Our people in every field are looking to us for help. They have heard of our efforts. They know of the appropriations that were made in November.

It is too late to take a backward step. We have absolutely appropriated the money. The bond of Methodism is given already for a million. It is down upon the books. Now we are looking to the Church to make it good. Our hope will be fulfilled.

Mr. Scribner, one of the ornaments of the publishing trade in this city, the senior member, who died in Lucerne a few years ago, once said to me: "We publishers never trust the public half enough. When a good manuscript comes to us for examination, and we know

it to be good, it is our business to give it to the world, and not think of the income from it, for when the public sees it it will have it. The public must be trusted to do its duty to worth."

We dare not grow skeptical of the Church. We suspect sometimes that the Church will receive news of advance with misgiving. It is not so. The Church is often ahead of the very men who propose to lead it. There are people now here, and all over our American land, that are begging for the opportunity of swelling this great figure up to still greater dimensions than we have dared to name. They are expecting it in India, in Germany, in all these lands.

They are looking for it, like Simeon for the great salvation, but not because they want more salary. Why, I tried in many cases in India, to get a man to talk with me about his salary. But they all refused to say one But they all refused to say one word upon the question. I thought at last I had found one who would converse upon the subject. It was a preacher's wife, and I shall never forget the look with which she stared me in the face. I knew the income was too scanty, and next to nothing. She looked at me closely, and I was ashamed that I had said a word, when she replied: "Why do you ask me ?" I said, "Because I have my fears." "Well," she said, "don't you know that God takes care of his own?" The tears did steal into her eyes. and that was all my satisfaction. At the last General Missionary Committee meeting, among other good things that it did, but without knowing, was to take care of that man's salary.

Do our foreign missionaries expect this large increase from any relation to the question of salary? Not at all.

Look at that German conference of one hundred men. One year ago they cut down their salaries five per cent., and last June ten per cent., to give the proceeds to the missionary work in their land. That is what our foreign workers are constantly doing-giving their lives and their savings. What they want is the round million to help them extend their work. They know, too, that it will come. They are sure that all American Methodism is going to support them in that grand march which they are making for the world's salvation.

this city, it found that the receipts for the year hi been $95,702 greater than the previous year. The i crease from Conferences was $41,845; from legaci 51,931; sundries, 1,924. The total receipts for the ye just closed amount to $826,868. That is $75,348 mo than any previous year in the history of the Society. When the General Missionary Committee meets, never has money enough. The demands on it are grea than it is able to supply, and I have no doubt if the n lion was raised this year, as I trust it will be, the Comm tee at its meeting next November will need a milli and a quarter, to anything like supply the demands th will come pouring in upon it. Now, this General Co mittee, finding this encouraging increase from Church, made largely increased appropriations:

The appropriation made by the General Committee 1884 for 1885 was $850,000. The Committee last mo appropriated, $1,000,000. It ventured to increase appropriations for work in 1886, $123,936.

Now, that is the work that is before the Secretar in raising this million. They must raise it to pay money appropriated. I hope they will succeed in do it.

Bishop Harris.-Before introducing Chaplain McC it is my duty to read to the congregation a pream and resolution adopted unanimously by the Mission Board at their meeting day before yesterday:

Whereas, It is understood that at the Anniversary Meetin the Missionary Society, to be held in the Academy of Music the 17th inst., a departure is to be made from the uniform well established custom of taking a collection, Therefore, collection to be taken at the Anniversary of the Missionary S

Resolved that in the judgment of the Board of Managers

ety, to be held in the Academy of Music on the 17th inst., sha regarded as the inauguration of a movement to secure during present fiscal year, ending Oct. 31, 1886, the round million do appropriated by the General Committee, and that such subs tions may be paid through the churches which may be indic by the subscriber.

Now, I have the pleasure of introducing to Chaplain McCabe.

Dr. McCabe.-The hour is late, but I hope you all remain here until we get through. This is the Mr. President, we must redeem our obligation. This of many meetings that we hope to hold all over young child of American Christianity-our beloved Meth-country in our effort to raise this million of dollars. odist Episcopal Church-has its duty to do for the great outlying world, at home and abroad. We are not blind to it. The necessity is on us, now, and for all the years to come, to give to others as God has given to us. (Applause).

I did hope that somehow we would raise our co tions to $900,000 by the close of this meeting; and t by a great rally of the Church the Centennial Mil

would be raised.

Do

If I am to be disappointed, what then? Grant did when he failed to take Richmond the

Bishop Harris introduced Mr. John M. Phillips, Treas- time he tried. We are so near the million now urer of the Missionary Society, who said:

Mr. Phillips. I will only take two or three minutes of your time. The year to which I allude in anything I have to say is the Missionary financial year, running from the first of November of each year to the 31st of October of the following year. When the General Missionary Committee met the fifth of November last in

everybody sees it can be done. As Bishop Hurst s "The Million is coming as sure as the rising sun."

Collectors were then appointed to go through the gregation. $4,300 in subscriptions and cash were cured from the audience, which, together with card scriptions previously obtained, brought up the collec to $30,300.

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