I gathered all the earth; and there was none that moved a wing, or opened a mouth, or peeped.’  That is the voice of the lust for Empire for selfish advantages.  And here is the other one:  ’The kings of Tarshish and of the isles shall bring presents; yea, all kings shall fall down before Him; all nations shall serve Him, for He shall deliver the needy when he crieth, the poor also, and him that hath no helper.  He shall redeem their soul from deceit and violence, and precious shall their blood be in His sight.’  That is the voice that has learned:  ’He that is greatest among you, let him be your servant’; and that the dominion founded on unselfish surrender for others is the only dominion that will last.  Brethren! that is the spirit in which alone England will keep its Empire over the world.

I need not remind you that the gift which we have to carry to the heathen nations, the subject peoples who are under the aegis of our laws, is not merely our literature, our science, our Western civilisation, still less the products of our commerce, for all of which some of them are asking; but it is the gift that they do not ask for.  The dew ‘waiteth not for man, nor tarrieth for the sons of men.’  We have to create the demand by bringing the supply.  We have to carry Christ’s Gospel as the greatest gift that we have in our hands.

And now, I was going to have said a word, lastly, but I see it can only be a word, about—­

III.  The failure to fulfil the function.

Israel failed.  Pharisaism was the end of it—­a hugging itself in the possession of the gift which it did not appreciate, and a bitter contempt of the nations, and so destruction came, and the fire on the hearth was scattered and died out, and the vineyard was taken from them and ‘given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof.’  Change the name, as the Latin poet says, and the story is told about us.  England largely fails in this function; as witness in India godless civilians; as witness on every palm-shaded coral beach in the South Seas, profligate beach-combers, drunken sailors, unscrupulous traders; as witness the dying out of races by diseases imported with profligacy and gin from this land.  ‘A dew from the Lord!’; say rather a malaria from the devil!  ‘By you,’ said the Prophet, ’is the name of God blasphemed among the Gentiles.’  By Englishmen the missionary’s efforts are, in a hundred cases, neutralised, or hampered if not neutralised.

We have failed because, as Christian people, we have not been adequately in earnest.  No man can say with truth that the churches of England are awake to the imperative obligation of this missionary enterprise.  ’If God spared not the natural branches, take heed lest He spare not thee.’  Israel’s religion was not diffusive, therefore it corrupted; Israel’s religion did not reach out a hand to the nations, therefore its heart was paralysed and stricken.  They who bring the Gospel to others