with his companions without any tangible success. Earthquakes, disastrous fires, cholera, storms, vary the narrative instead of "sunderbunds" and crocodiles and river floods, as in Assam. In 1879 he had touched the goal of his ambition, when he completed the translation of the New Testament into the Japanese language. He believed that the pure Japanese conveyed the sense of the original, with a distinctness which terms derived from the Chinese could never present to an ordinary Japanese mind. We give some original ideas of his on the Bible, which, coming from one whose scholarship never exceeded his spirituality, are worthy of consideration. "Papists have foisted upon Scripture the ideas of Paganism; Protestants have borrowed the ideas of Papists; Baptists have followed in the wake of other Protestants, until the Bible is covered with glosses, about as thick as those of the Scribes and Pharisees, which the Saviour swept away with such terrible energy. I think the Bible will emerge from the dust and haze which has been thrown around it, but will emerge a very different book from what either Protestant or Papist makes it. The more I have studied the New Testament, the more I believe it is a book to be taken in a common-sense way, and that for a common reader it is a good deal better without a commentary than with one. With which we largely agree, for commentaries are very much like labour-saving machines, giving the results of another man's study, which becomes a substitute for that prolonged, patient, conscientious perusal, without which the real thought of the inspired writer is seldom grasped so as to become assimilated in the mind of the reader. Another version was afterwards made by the Yokohama Translation Committee, of which Mr. Brown was a member. Booklets and tracts were issued by the thousand from the mission press, which he managed himself. "The people seemed almost wild to get the Gospel narratives in their own vernacular." Of his noble thoughts concerning Christian Union and the Church of the future, we have space only for the following: "God will select for the Church of the future all the excellencies to be found in each existing Church. Then shall the will of God be done on earth as it is in heaven." At length increasing years brought feebleness to the stalwart frame, but he continued his translating and revising work even when unable to sit at the table, and until the paper dropped from the weary hands on the bed where he lay. His death was a beautiful one, like to the dying of thousands of those who have lived nobly for Christ. It occurred on the first day of 1866. He had been thirteen years in Japan, three in excess of his expecta tions, and besides the translation of the New Testament, succeeded in gathering in eight times as many converts as he said at the outset would content him. At his funeral the other evangelical missionaries took part, including our own Dr. Cochran. A life such as this wakes all the tendencies to hero-worship. It would not be difficult to cover paper with warm panegyric, but we prefer to say, thanks be to God who raises up such men, veritable Christian heroes, who, absorbing the philanthropic spirit of the Master, reproduce a character worthy to be put in the same list with the Apostles of our Lord. The title of the book aptly represents the dominant ideas of his noble life. He had lived amongst Brahmans, Buddhists, Mohammedans, Shintoists and Christians of various sects; he had pleaded for the white drunkard and the coloured slave; he had written for and preached to a vast variety of races, and in all he had found human nature the same in its proneness to sin, the same in its capacity for holiness. He had found in Vermont, in Assam and in Japan, that human hearts hungered for a Saviour, and knowing how great a Saviour Jesus Christ is to all who accept Him, he had earnestly pressed his brother men under every sky to accept that Saviour, and he had found that same Jesus "able to save to the uttermost all who came to God by Him, seeing He ever liveth to make intercession for them." He had thus demonstrated that the whole world is kin, and it need not be wondered at, that a short while before his death he wrote the sentences which appear as motto on the title page of his biography: "Freedom is in the air; we inhale the Gospel of a common brotherhood; the globe becomes one household, and all its members are kindred." TORONTO. THOU didst reach forth Thy hand and mine infold; As by Thy hold of me. I find, I walk, I love, but, ah! the whole My clearest way is that which faith had shown, CITY MISSION WORK.* BY B. E. BULL, B.A. CITY Mission work is a very comprehensive subject, embracing, as it does, all philanthropic and evangelistic agencies used in our cities for the reclamation or salvation of those unreached by the ordinary Church services and work. It embraces the work of the Church which, seeing a quarter of the city in the suburbs or poorer districts without church or denominational privileges, institutes a mission service, with the view of forming eventually a Church organization. Many of our prosperous churches owe their origin to these humble beginnings. The work of such missions is largely evangelistic. The class of attendants is usually the respectable poor living in the neighbourhood, and the methods about the same as are pursued in aggressive evangelical churches. The results numerically are much greater and more far-reaching than anything attained by a class of mission work among people of a much lower grade, which is very often denominated slum work. By slum work, I mean to embrace all evangelistic and philanthropic agencies at work for the alleviation of distress, reformation and ultimate salvation of the wretchedly poor and degraded inhabitants of the back streets and alleys of our cities, rescue work among destitute and neglected children, drunkards, criminals, dissolute men and women, tramps and homeless men-in fact, every class of work among what are usually called the lapsed or unreached masses, is included in the efforts of zealous and devoted mission workers. But what is the necessity for such missions? Cannot our downtown churches do the work among the poor? Cannot the Church itself reach the masses and gather them into its fold? The only answer I have to that question is, that the Church has hitherto failed to do so. In all large cities you will find the wretchedly poor, the victims of vice and intemperance, tramps and criminals, and the only way they can be reached by Gospel influences is through mission work. You can gather them into the mission hall when no inducement, short of a free supper, could bring them within the walls of a church. The Church can reach them, however, indirectly, by working through the mission, for I wish to state here, most emphatically, that I believe in the mission * An address given at the Convention of the Ontario Methodist Young People's Association, Toronto, March 1st, 1893. being, if possible, attached to and supported by the Church. It is better for the Church, better for the workers, better for the people. The church having one or two missions attached to it, is always a live church. The mission represents the surplus energy of the church. The workers united together by church relationship are not so apt to ride a hobby. They are willing to admit that not quite all the good work is being done by themselves; and the converts enrolled in church membership are better cared for and likely to prove more steadfast. General Booth's submerged tenth is to be found in all our cities, who will never hear the Gospel message unless it is brought to their houses, or presented to them by work outside of our church walls. The report given a few days ago by the Secretary of the Associated Charities of Toronto, shows that during the winter of 1892-93, one in every twenty families received aid from some charity. It is an easy thing for some of us who spend our days in our down-town offices, or warehouses, or in our comfortable homes, and our evenings amidst pleasant and agreeable surroundings, to shut our eyes to destitution, misery, wretchedness and crime, and say that in our goodly moral city little exists; but if we want to be enlightened, let us go with some of our faithful mission workers into the so-called homes down in our slums, or walk the streets in the poorer quarters at night, and the one half will get some idea how the other half lives. I have stood at the door of our mission on Street-Jarvis Street, with its beautiful residences and comfortable homes, while its lower end is a nest of taverns when it seemed as if almost every one that passed was reeling drunk. With staggering steps they poured out of the grog shops, a long procession-going down, down, to drunkards' graves, and a drunkard's hell—and I've thought how little do the business men, who, a few hours ago, were busily engaged down town, know of the scenes now being enacted. Jarvis What is being done to Christianize our own heathen? There are powerful organizations for Foreign Missionary work, backed by the influence, authority and support of the Church; but how feeble is the effort put forth for the reclamation of the paupers and neglected inhabitants of our cities. How few churches there are with any organization for city mission work among this class. A missionary from Japan, China, Africa, or the Islands of the Sea is welcomed and honoured, and justly so; but why not recognize the faithful toiler in our slums, whose sacrifices often are as great and duties as disagreeable? The result of this lack of sympathy from the Church is, that the work is left largely to independent missionary enterprise, and the cause loses the powerful help of the Church-the Church the zeal and enthusiasm of the mission. The command is not only to "Go into all the world," but "To go out quickly into the streets and lanes of the city, and bring in hither the poor and the maimed and the halt and the blind." To pass from the work to the workers, the Macedonian call is loud and clear: The harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few-and the duly qualified labourers are still fewer, The requirements to success are, I think, first, Consecration. There must be a complete "giving up" to the work-surrender of self and selfish interests to the service of the Master. This involves regularity and punctuality at the services-an ever-present consciousness of the responsibility and importance of each individual worker for the success of the work, an intense zeal and enthusiasm for it. During the last six or seven years, I have been thrown much among mission workers, and I know no more enthusiastic people under the sun than they. Another requirement is a burning sense of the value of a human soul, and an intense love for humanity. With the zealous mission worker, distinctions of rank, social position, education and wealth disappear, and the pauper, the drunkard, the criminal, the lowest denizen of the slum, is revealed simply as a human soula brother mortal-responsible to his Maker, standing at last, as will the millionaire, the statesman, the courtier, naked before Him who sitteth on the great white throne. In our Church services, a considerable portion of the time is taken up with efforts to convince respectable sinners that they require any change of life or heart. In a mission service little time need be spent on this line. They know that they are vile and sinful, and acknowledge it. The difficulty is to get them to believe that there is any hope for them. They have tried over and over again to reform, but the chains of vice were too strong to be broken by human power. They have been battered about, despised so by the world, that they have come to believe that nobody cares for them-that there is no salvation for them. Like dogs they live; like dogs they will die. The Gospel message told in the simplest manner comes to them with a newborn hope. They have visions of brightened lives and happy homes. Rarely is a faithful, earnest message given, but there are responses-inquirers after the way of salvation at almost every Gospel meeting. I know that the number of those who really reform is small, when compared with those who evince a desire to lead a new life; but each convert who remains faithful is as a brand |