rapid view, of the
whole of this world of ours. For the whole world is a mission field.
Missionaries are sent everywhere, including our own home-land, and
including all of our cities.

Our cities are as really mission fields as are the heathen lands. There
is a difference, but it is only one of degree. The Christian standards
present in our American life, and absent from these foreign-mission lands,
make an enormous difference. But, apart from that great fact, the need of
mission service is as really in New York as it is in Shanghai.

If we are to pray for the whole world, and to help in other ways to win
it, we ought to try to get something of a clear idea of it, to help us in
our thinking and praying and planning.

It will help toward that if we remember at the outset that the world from
the religious point of view, divides up easily into three great groups.
First there are the great non-Christian, or heathen, lands and nations.
This includes those called Mohammedan; for, while that religion is based
upon a partial Christian truth, it is so utterly corrupt in teaching and
morally foul in practice that it is distinctly classed with the heathen
religions.

Then there are the lands and nations under the control of those two great
mediaeval historic forms of Christianity, the Roman and Greek Churches, in
which the vital principles of the Christian life seem to have been almost
wholly lost in a network of forms and organization. The essential truths
are there. But they are hidden away and covered up. There are untold
numbers of true Christians there, but they live in a strangely clouded
twilight.

The third great group is of lands and peoples under the sway of the
Protestant churches.

<u>The Needle of the Compass of Need.</u>

Let us look a little at these peoples. Where shall we start in? The old
rule of the Master's command, and of the early Church's practice, was to
begin "at Jerusalem," and keep moving until the outmost limit of the world
was reached. I suppose that practically, in service, beginning at
Jerusalem means beginning just where you are, and then reaching out to
those nearest, and then less near, until you have touched the farthest.

But the old Jerusalem rule will make a good geographical rule for us
English-speaking people, with an ocean between us, in getting a fresh look
at this old world that the Master asks us to carry in our hearts and on
our hands. So we'll begin there.

The needle