to-day. The Indian service of the British Government, and even the
service of the great commercial companies, have that element of heroism
in it them which has attracted the very best brain and brawn of the
English race to India. So it seems to me we will have to hold up these
great organizations, which reach down to the hard places of the land,
which occupy places that require men to man them, in order to recruit
the ranks of our ministers. A man needs to know that he will have to be
all the more a man to be anything of a minister now-a-days, to attract
him into this great work. And this heroic type of Christian ministry and
of Christian manhood and womanhood, shown in the half century of this
society's work and existence, is to my mind one of the great attractions
upon the best, the strongest, and the most consecrated of those men and
women who devote their lives to the service of the church.

Its reflex influence upon every other branch of missionary activity in
the church is very plain. It is to-day--I do not hesitate to say it--the
hero of our organizations. It takes far less stamina, far less
consecration, I believe, to go to India, or China, or Japan than it does
to come out at the call of God and of this agency of His divine
Providence and enter many a field manned by this Association. In the
_personnel_ of our theological seminaries I have long noticed that the
choicest spirits, the men with the stamp of courage upon them, those who
are not working for place, but for Christ, and him alone, are the men
who take up this work. They are the men who, when they come back to the
schools of the prophets, thrill our hearts as no other men do with the
story of the conquests of Christ in their own hearts as well as out in
the hard fields which they cultivate for his sake; and there will be no
more glowing missionary meeting of the seminary with which I have the
honor to be connected than when the reports of this meeting shall be
carried back to the brethren. The prayers of the class-rooms, the