the dark ages, the interest in literature that came
with the study of Latin and Greek, and the awakening of thought that
followed upon the discovery of new worlds--material and
intellectual--and then add to this the new forces of the Reformation,
the reconstruction of men's moral and religious ideas and ideals and
the recovery of the right of the individual conscience, and if to
these we could conceive as added the French Revolution--the break-up
of all that men had regarded as final in social and political
organization; and if to these again could be added the movement of
modern science, which began with Lord Bacon's _Novum Organum_--and the
application of the inductive method in the discovery of the forces and
laws of nature; and, if further we could conceive of these great
forces as operating, not at different times, in different countries,
through a period of several centuries, but as combined and
concentrated in a brief decade or two in one country upon a great
people, we should have a more adequate conception of the magnitude and
significance of the present Revolution in China."

A significant fact is that most of the revolutionary forces and agencies
which have brought about the awakening have come from Christian lands.
The most powerful single force at work has been the missionary. He has
carried with him the finest ideals of Western civilization, and has been
able in an unusual way to bring the latest ideas in all realms of life
to bear upon the non-Christian world. A condition exists which
Professor Ross, in _The Changing Chinese_, a book which it will pay
every man to read, finely describes in the following words:

"The crucifixion was two hundred and eighty years old before
Christianity won toleration in the Roman Empire. It was one hundred
and twenty-eight years after Luther's defiance before the permanence
of the Protestant Reformation was assured. After the discovery of the
New World one hundred and fifteen years elapsed before the first
English colony was planted here. No one who saw the beginning of these
great, slow, historic movements could grasp their full import or
witness their culmination. But nowadays world processes are telescoped
and history is made at aviation speed."

All this makes it clear that we have come to an hour of crisis in the
relations between Christendom and the non-Christian world. What is a
crisis but a point of time in the history of the human race when great
issues are at