greater diplomacy and astuteness, hard sound sense, and untiring
devotion.

Some good friends are sometimes disposed to be critical of methods and
management. They think the affair could be conducted better in some
details which they think important. Well, it would be surprising if it
were not so. The same criticisms are made of every governmental and great
industrial enterprise. Everything human seems to make progress by
correcting and improving. But the thing for you and me to keep a
critically keen eye upon is this: that no such detail be allowed to affect
by so much as a hair's weight the steadfast ardor of our support.

No strong man in the thick of the great driving purpose of his life is
turned aside or stopped by the biting or buzzing of a few insects. If even
they can't be brushed aside, let them buzz and bite, but don't let the
great passion of a life be affected by them. Indeed, they will be clean
forgot, even while they are remembered, by the man who has been caught and
swept by the fire of his Master's passion for a world.

<u>A Minority Movement.</u>

Yet, be it keenly marked, these great strides have been made by a
minority, who have followed the strong leaders. The whole Church is not
yet awake. Many protest strenuously against being waked up. The
alarm-clocks bother them. Sometimes one is inclined to think that the
foreign boards are peculiarly placed between a refrigerator and a furnace.

Missionaries come back home fresh from the front fairly aflame with the
fervor of their enthusiasm. Their convictions of what could be done, and
should be done, are apt to be spoken out with great positiveness. They
seem to some to suggest in an uncomfortable way the thought of a glowing
furnace. And many in the home churches seem able to listen with such
indifference as to suggest to these returned men and women the chilling
air of an ice-box. In between the two sits the Church board engaging in
the difficult task of trying to equalize the temperature. But that's
merely a detail in passing.

The great fact to mark is that never has the missionary movement bulked so
large. And never have such broad statesmanlike plans, such aggressiveness
of spirit, coupled with deep devotion, marked the Church in its great
life-mission.

One morning at a popular summer resort on the Long Island Sound coast
thousands of bathers were enjoying the surf-bathing. The life-saving crew
were stationed for duty, on the lookout fo