tories.=--While the survey of the progress of the kingdom
by centuries just given is inspiring, recent years have witnessed an
unprecedented response to the Christian appeal.

Looking at America first we discover that one hundred years ago there
were 364,872 communicant members of the Protestant churches out of a
population of 5,305,925, or one in fourteen. To-day one in four of the
population is identified with the Protestant church. These are not
nominal Christians, as in the paragraph above, but actual Protestant
church-members. These figures make it clear that the forces of
aggressive Christianity in America have realized a tremendous return
on their investment. If we include Catholic and all other religious
bodies the total communicant members reach 36 millions in round
numbers, or about two fifths of the total population.

One hundred years ago only one in ten of the college students in
America was a communicant member of the Church; to-day practically
every other college student is a member of some church. It is
certainly encouraging that fifty per cent. of that small fraction of
our population which will furnish an enormous percentage of the
leaders are church-members to-day, or five times as large a proportion
as a hundred years ago.

The situation in the non-Christian world to-day is summed up, on the
basis of the statistics in the chart below, as follows: It took about
ninety years to gain the first million converts (1793-1885). The
second million were added in twenty-three years (1885-1908). They are
now being added at the rate of a million in ten years.

[Illustration: WORLD MISSION PROGRESS

GAIN IN PROTESTANT COMMUNICANTS
SINCE 1800 IN THE FOREIGN FIELD]

At the beginning of the nineteenth century there was not a single
Protestant in Japan, not one in China, only a few in India, and the
great non-Christian world was practically closed to the Protestant
missionary. Three of the five continents of the world were
inaccessible and a large part of a fourth largely untouched.

Protestant Christian work began in Japan in 1859. In 1913 there are
73,000 Protestant communicants,--among them twelve members of the
Japanese Parliament. The influence of the Protestant Christians in the
Empire is out of all proportion to their comparatively small numbers,
because Christianity began with the ruling classes in Japan. There are
to-day in that one country more Protestant Christians than there were in
all the non-Ch