retaries and students were opened. They saw themselves as others saw
them. They compared their own land and nation, mediaeval in spirit and
backward in resources, and their people untrained as children, with the
modern power, the restless ambition, the stern purpose, the intense life
of the western nations, with their mighty fleets and armaments, their
inventions and machinery, their economic and social theories and forces,
their provision for the poor, the sick, and the aged, the peerless
family life in the Christian home. They found, further yet, free
churches divorced from politics and independent of the state; that the
leading force of the world was Christianity, that persecution was
barbarous, and that toleration was the law of the future, and largely
the condition of the present. It took but a few whispers over the
telegraphic wire, and the anti-Christian edicts disappeared from public
view like snowflakes melting on the river. The right arm of persecution
was broken.

The story of the Book of Acts of the modern apostles in Japan is told,
first in the teaching of inquirers, preaching to handfuls, the gathering
of tiny companies, the translation of the Gospel, and then prayer and
waiting for the descent of the Holy Spirit. A study of the Book of the
Acts of the Apostles, followed in order to find out how the Christian
Church began. On the 10th day of March, in the year of our Lord and of
the era of Meiji (Enlightened Peace) the fifth, 1872, at Yokohama, in
the little stone chapel built on part of Commodore Perry's treaty
ground, was formed the first Reformed or Protestant Christian Church in
Japan.

At this point our task is ended. We cannot even glance at the native
Christian churches of the Roman, Reformed, or Greek order, or attempt to
appraise the work of the foreign missionaries. He has read these pages
in vain, however, who does not see how well, under Providence, the
Japanese have been trained for higher forms of faith.

The armies of Japan are upon Chinese soil, while we pen our closing
lines. The last chains of purely local and ethnic dogma are being
snapped asunder. May the sons of Dai Nippon, as they win new horizons of
truth, see more clearly and welcome more loyally that Prince of Peace
whose kingdom is not of this world.

May the age of political conquest end, and the era of the
self-reformation of the Asian nations, through the gospel of Jesus
Christ, be ushered in.

NOTES, AUTHORITIES, A