a degenerate Israel, we may wail about the beach-combers and
other loafers that go amongst savage lands from England--'Through you
the name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles.' A Hindoo once said
to a missionary, 'Your Book is very good. If you were as good as your
Book you would conquer India in five years.' That may be true or it
may not, but it gives us the impression that is produced by godless
Englishmen on heathen peoples. We are taking away their religion from
them, necessarily, as the result of education and contact with
European thought. And if we do not substitute for it the one faith
that elevates and saves, the last state of that man will be worse
than the first.

We can almost hear the rattle of the guns on the north-west frontier
of India to-day. There is another specimen of the injuries inflicted.
This is not the place to talk politics, but I feel that this is the
place to ask this question, 'Are Christian principles to have
anything to do in determining national actions?' Is it Christian to
impose our yoke on unwilling tribes who have as deep a love for
independence as the proudest Englishmen of us all, and as good a
right to it? Are punitive expeditions and Maxim guns instalments of
our debt to all men? I wonder what Jesus Christ, who died for Afridis
and Orakzais and all the rest of them, thinks about such conduct?

Brethren, we are debtors to all men. Let us do our best to influence
national action in accordance with the brotherhood which has been
revealed to us by the Elder Brother of us all; and let us, at least
for our own parts, recognise, and, as much as in us is, discharge the
debt which, by our common humanity, and by our possession of the
universal Gospel we owe to all men, and which is made more weighty by
the benefits we receive from many, and by the injuries which England
has inflicted on not a few. Else shall we hear rise above all the
voices that palliate crime, on the plea of 'State necessity,' the
stern words of the Master, 'In thy skirts is found the blood of the
souls of poor innocents.' We are debtors; let us pay our debts.

THE GOSPEL THE POWER OF GOD[1]

'I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ: for it is
the power of God unto salvation to every one that
believeth.'--ROMANS i. 16.

To preach the Gospel in Rome had long been the goal of Paul's hopes.
He wished to do in the centre of power what he had done in Athens,
the home of wisdom; and with superb c