IONS FAVORABLE TO THE SPREAD OF CHRISTIANITY

THE MULTIPLYING AGENCIES OF THE KINGDOM

SIGNS OF WORLD-WIDE VICTORY

I. WORLD CONDITIONS FAVORABLE TO THE SPREAD OF CHRISTIANITY

=An Accessible World.=--1. Improved means of intercommunication. That
we live in a contracting world is strikingly illustrated by the fact
that when Robert Morrison went to China it took him seventy-eight days
to reach New York from England, and four months to go from New York to
China. Hunter Corbett, of China, who was six months on his way the
first time he took the trip, made the journey a few months ago in
twenty-one days. It is now possible to go from Peking to London in
twelve and one-half days over the Trans-Siberian Railroad. A recent
journey around the world was made in less than thirty-six days. When
Jules Verne published _Around the World in Eighty Days_, the journey
described was laughed at as an impossible feat. To-day it is possible
to circle the globe in less than one half the time of which Jules
Verne wrote in his book. It took the old Greeks forty days to go the
length of the Mediterranean Sea in their swiftest triremes. The
greatest stretch of open water in the world is 10,000 miles in the
Pacific Ocean. There are vessels afloat to-day that can traverse the
10,000 miles in one half the time that it took the old Greeks to go
the length of the Mediterranean Sea.

2. The nations of the earth are accessible because of changed sentiment.

There are to-day no lands in the world which are closed entirely to
modern influence and only a few which do not at least tolerate the
Christian missionary with his advanced ideas of civilization and
progress. It is difficult to estimate the amazing changes in sentiment
in lands where missionaries have been at work even for a generation,
as in Korea, or for a century or more, as in India or China.

It is unthinkable that there should ever be another Chinese wall
shutting out all world contact. Edicts in force as late as 1870 ordering
the death of Christians in Japan are now exhibited only as relics of a
buried past. The twentieth century is making hermit nations impossible.

3. A mental attitude has been created in the non-Christian world which
nothing but Christ can satisfy. This may be only an indefinite
restlessness and dissatisfaction with existing conditions in many
cases, but it is apparently true that the principles of the Christian
gospel have created an altogether new ment