The slum ends and sides of our Christian cities and huge heathendom,
jostle elbows in the likeness of their moral conditions. The need is
everywhere, crying earnestly, wretchedly out to us. There is good mission
ground anywhere you please to strike in.

But--<i>but</i>, by far the greatest need, with that word "greatest"
intensified beyond all power of description, is in the heathen lands. The
vastness of the numbers there, the utter ignorance, the smallness of their
chance of getting any of the knowledge and uplift of the Gospel, all go to
spell out that word "greatest." The awful cumulative power of sin,
unchecked by the common moral standards of life, with the terrific
momentum of centuries; the common temptations known to us, but with a
fierceness and subtlety wholly unknown to us in Christian lands--and yet
how terrifically fierce and cunningly subtle some of us know them to
be!--these all make every letter in that word "greatest" stand out in
biggest capitals, and in blackest, inkiest ink.

<u>Groping in the Dark.</u>

That is a bare suggestion of the need of the world <i>in bulk</i>. But we want
to get a much closer look than that. These are <i>men</i> that we are talking
about; our <i>brothers</i>, not merely hard, unfeeling, statistical totals of
millions. Each man of them contains the whole pitiable picture of the sore
need of the world vividly portrayed in himself.

The very heathen religions themselves are the crying out, in the night, of
men's hearts, after something they haven't, and yet need so much. Strange
things these heathen superstitions and monstrous practices and beliefs
called religions! It has been rather the thing of late to speak somewhat
respectfully of them, and rather apologetically. They have even been
praised, so strangely do things get mixed up in this world of ours. It
has been supposed that God was revealing Himself in these religions; and
that in them men were reaching up to God, and <i>could</i> reach up to Him
through them.

They really are the twilight remnants of the clear direct light of God
that once lightened all men; <i>but</i> so mixed through, and covered up with
error and superstition and unnatural devilish lust, that they are wholly
inadequate to lead any man back home to God. In almost all of them there
is indeed some distinct kernel of truth. But that kernel has been
invariably shut up in a shell and bur that are hard beyond any power of
cracking, to get at t