That great missionary, St. Paul, once said--and he may have often
said it--that he gloried in his own infirmities; adding that the
power of Christ might rest on him. This is our glory--if we have any.
Here is this American Missionary Association; and over against it,
face to face, is China. What proportion is there between the two? How
preposterous, one may say, the thought which we are trying to frame
into actual purpose for the regeneration of this enormous part of the
human family? Most true. And yet, along with Paul's thought, how
infinitely inspiring this purpose should be. Just the thing for us to
do is to "build better than we know." It is not our eye, but His,
which sees the end from the beginning. And it is his
providence--sometimes as a pillar of fire, sometimes as a pillar of
cloud--which shows us the way. Then it is for us to follow close up.

When some fifteen years ago, that slender, forlorn-seeming Japanese
lad landed in Boston, with the strange, vague, resistless,
heaven-enkindled longing in his heart; what if there had been no
kindly hand to grasp his own, no heart to discern and respond to his?
How easily might young Neesima have been lost, and the fateful turn
in the destiny of Japan at the moment of its supreme opportunity for
regeneration been vastly, disastrously different! What Chinese
Neesimas to-day God's eye may have under His gracious watch and
merciful leading, we cannot know beforehand; but this is certain,
that we know enough to know that we do well to walk softly all the
day long as seeing things invisible, and that with these thousands of
Chinese among us, walking so noiselessly, so observantly in and out
beneath the very tree of life that grows beside the river of life
clear as crystal, and which proceeds direct from the throne of the
Lamb, there are doubtless God's hidden ones, whose lives, if we will