parts perhaps half a hundred years, with no other purpose than to elevate the social and moral condition of another nationality.1

IO. ALTRURIAL ADVENTURES IN THE LAND OF ZOROASTER.

I might have said the birthplace of Zoroaster, that is, Oroomiah. For this is the city which the Americans selected for their Nestorian venture. Whether Zoroaster ever lived there is of little moment, since the world is at odds by some thousands of years as to when he was born, and to all the intents of modern life he is known chiefly through Mr. Crawford's thoroughly artistic novel.

The Americans found a city and plain peopled by the followers of that amiable heretic of whom the earlier world was not worthy, Nestorius the Syrian, who, as patriarch of Constantinople, A.D. 428, was driven into the deserts for beliefs and misbeliefs that he stoutly denied holding. His followers early established themselves in Persia, and for four or five centuries they flourished greatly, and became a great missionary power in Persia, Syria, India, and China,

during the seventh century. Yet in later ages they fell into decay, and conformed not a little to the people around them.

1 General Lew. Wallace, a keen-sighted and astute observer of men and their work, who as Minister to Turkey saw much of what has been wrought in the Orient by philanthropic Americans, writes, under date of January 8, 1894, that he is in hearty sympathy with our missionaries in the East; soon after his return from Turkey his words were published at some length, in which he gave them unqualified praise for their Christian self-devotement to a work productive of the highest good.

2 Founded by Cyrus Hamlin, D.D., LL.D., it bears the name of Mr. Christopher Robert, of New York, who contributed $30,000, one half the cost of its building. The real estate is held upon a deed directly from the Sultan. The fire-proof edifice is placed under the protection of the United States; having the right to fly the stars and stripes over the Bosphorus the next thousand years or more, - there being two towers near by, not so well built, that have already stood four centuries. Armenians, Bulgarians, and Greeks, in nearly equal numbers, constitute the average of two hundred students, whose educational standing is that of the classes in the smaller New England colleges.

Oroomiah is in a plain, twenty miles by forty, where there are three hundred Nestorian villages. It is a little people, two-score thousand in the plain, and as many more in the mountains. Morals were at

a low ebb, and education in such state that even the priesthood had almost no schooling. There was no attempt to convey moral and religious instruction, and churchly services were conducted in an unknown tongue. The Bible was acknowledged as the Word of God, but there was no spiritual experience to conform to its truths. Under these circumstances a few disinterested American philanthro

This is the only portrait now in print.

pists undertook a grand experiment in Christian sociology, conducting it in the interior of a far-away continent. After fifty years it was found that they had spent twelve hundred thousand dollars upon it, and sent out a hundred workers of the brightest and most selfdevoted, like Dr. Grant of Utica, who relinquished a lucrative practice to go, Fidelia Fiske, the pride of New England, scholarly men like Tutor Perkins of Amherst, like Coan and Dr. Shedd. There was scant commercial interest in Persia, but Amer

ica sought out the young people of the land of Zoroaster and educated more than a thousand of them every year throughout half a century. There was no political tie between the New World and this ancient people, but the Americans gathered some twenty-five hundred persons into Christian churches in Persia.

It was no part of the plan, however, to form new churches, nor are churches the measure of the result. It was the design rather to help

1 As teacher and resident at Mount Holyoke, and as founder and teacher of the Oroomiah boarding school, Miss Fiske was singularly indued with the Power from on High, leading her pupils in the paths of spiritual peace.

the local ecclesiastics, and to work through them, and this plan succeeded to an amazing degree. Seven small boys meeting in a cellar were the first pupils in what is now Oroomiah College, yet three out of four Nestorian bishops and the priests in large numbers sought to avail themselves of the intellectual and moral light that came to them from the West. Village free schools were opened, and their teachers

KASHU MUSHA BENJAMEN, A NESTORIAN PASTOR AND HIS FAMILY. He has been a preacher for thirty-seven years: eighteen in Oroomiah, and nineteen in Tabriz. In his work he has traveled 25.000 miles. in Kurdistan. in Persia, in Caucasia, and in Turkestan. "My eyes," he says in his letter of June 18, 1894. "have seen the wonderful deeds of God. He puts the atheists and infidels to shame. Glory to God, I will glorify God and His deeds, in eternity."

fitted for their work by American women, and scores of places were opened for popular moral and religious instruction. "I am a woman," said one who excused herself from learning to read, and she shrugged her shoulders with the sense of having given a perfect answer; yet the Nestorian women proved to be as capable as any in the East, so renowned for wisdom of old.

Among other things, it is to be said, that the exact and scholarly men who visited this field, found, after having resided three years in the country, that the people were short of Bibles, being almost out; there was but one copy of the Old Testament, and that was in three or four volumes which were owned by different persons. Within sixteen years, the men of the West translated the Bible into modern Syriac, and within twenty years, they printed eight and a quarter millions of pages of other Christian literature, so fitting out their wards with the beginnings of a still more elaborate education outside the schoolroom.

Now all this story reads much like a modern miracle, a marvelous tale out of a book of Christian Arabian Nights. Rawlinson, the English ambassador to Persia, has borne strong testimony to the value of this American missionary service, as he saw it both in Persia and in Turkey. It is a story of disinterested and pure benevolence: whenever it can be matched out of recent records Mohammedan, Brahmanical, Buddhist, Confucian, or Agnostic, then we will consider the claims of these Isms to universal sway.1

II. THE HUMANITARIAN VALUE OF MORAL AND RELIGIOUS IDEAS.

In respect to this magnificent exhibit made by Christianity in attempting the education of everybody's children, alluded to upon. pages preceding, there can be made no valid objection, upon the score that first or last the education is religious. It is so. The knowledge of the multiplication table does not effect the moral reformation of man. There is nothing more wholesome in the way of education, for the whole human race as such, than the teaching of such moral truth as they ought to know. Dr. Vincent, whom all the world holds in honor for his spiritual gifts and ministerial work, as well as for his incidental service to humanity in the invention of that synonym of home education known as the Chautauqua Reading Courses, has written expressly upon this point.

PAPER BY THE REV. JOHN HEYL VINCENT, D.D., LL.D.

BISHOP OF THE METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH.

What this world needs is truth. It needs to receive the simple ideas which set forth man's relations to man and to the great First Cause from whom man came, and the duties which spring out of these rela

1 The Persian missions, long conducted by the American Board, are still carried on with great success by the American Presbyterians.

tions.

The Teacher from Nazareth so spake in Capernaum and in Jerusalem that "the common people heard Him gladly." He taught no set dogmas, no formal creeds. He told in a simple way what men should be to each other, and to illustrate and enforce this he told men what God is to them, and how He would have all men everywhere think of Him from the platform of love for each other. This is the charm and the power of true Christianity. Its thought of God is never divorced from its thought of man, its conception of God grows out of its ideal of man as revealed in Jesus, its anthropomorphic misconceptions of God are the perversion of a good thing, its moral sense as applied to man extends to God; man must "do right" as God is always sure to "do right"; a loveless obedience to God is empty, a service of God that does not produce true love for man is profitless. Thus Theology and Humanity are one, and the Christian Scheme is the perfect humanitarian scheme to which no form of religious thought through all the ages may for one moment be compared.

The best method of humanizing society is to Christianize it with the large ideas which characterized the teaching of the Nazarene, the universal ideas. The race a unit, one in origin, one in destiny, one in opportunity; the race under the same moral rule, the race in need of the same gracious provisions, subject to the same spiritual influences, looking up into the face of the same Father as revealed in Jesus, who came to suffer death for every man, and who commissioned His followers to carry this gospel to every creature, to the ends of the earth, and to the end of the ages.

Christian ideas, freed from doginatic and ecclesiastical bonds, are the regenerating forces of the world, bringing them into true brotherhood, reforming society by regenerating it, changing nations by the silently-working leaven of gospel truth even before the formal credo of the Christian faith is accepted or the symbol of that faith exalted, and preparing the way even in heathen lands for a sudden acceptance of the Christian thought, the Christian name, the Christian cult, and the Christian Church.

Johnst Vincent