and called forth their noblest service.  So our Lord seems to be saying to American churches and to the constituency of this Society, “’Ye are the light of the world.’  On you depends the evangelization of these despised Chinese.  Treating them now contemptuously and now even brutally, ye are called to be salt to them, thus saving them from moral deterioration, and inoculating them with the spirit of the Gospel.  Ye are to illuminate them with the light you have to shed as followers of Christ, and the responsibility is laid upon you to carry to them the principles of that faith which has given to us whatever excellence we have as a Nation.  I expect you to Christianize these representatives of the Orient, to convert them to the worship of the God of the Bible.”  In this expectation of the Master, lies at once our obligation and our privilege.  Much is laid upon us, but the trust brings with it honor, and inspires to grandest service.

The progress already made in this work, the cheering tokens of success that are reported by all laborers in this field, ought to awaken a far greater sympathy for those in whose behalf we are called to make our Christ-like expenditures.  It is time we rose above the mean political enmities which have embarrassed not a little this imperative evangelism.  Our treatment of these people is but another chapter in our history on which other and larger hearted generations will look with shame and sorrow.  In the animosities born of our commercial greed, we have acted as if our religion had made us neither in life nor doctrine better than they.  Eager to send the Gospel to distant heathen, we have been reluctant to exemplify, and slow to practically apply, to the heathen in our midst the teaching of Christianity.  Now has come a new era, and the evangelistic efforts among the Chinese are assuming greater proportions than ever, and are engirt with every sign of gracious success.  We have yet to learn to respect the manhood in these emigrants from the great kingdom beyond the Pacific.  It is said of our Lord, when he came across the Publican Matthew, sitting at the receipt of custom, that “he saw a man,” and it was oftentimes the lowly, the shunned, the socially despised he called to become his disciples.  It is a great art, this of seeing in a man the ideal, the possible man.  When Jesus Christ looks upon a man, he looks him into a nobler manhood.  We need to rise above class distinctions, to regard no one common or unclean, to speak of no one as hopeless or worthless.

One word as to opportunity.  God always matches opportunity with ability, and when we stand face to face with opportunity, we must go forward or be recreant to every trust.

Here is this man—­the Chinaman—­on our coast, for whom we are doing exactly the same work that this Society has been urging us to do for the black race, in raising up preachers amongst them to go back to the homes in their own country and there become the proper evangels to their own people.  When we realize that this is our work, and this is the opportunity before us, we shall talk of the Chinese question with more seriousness.