touch of Jesus reveals the kinship that is there between Him
and men, _and_ between all men.

In Japan it was the Portuguese that first took the Gospel a few hundred
years ago. And you still find Japanese churches founded by the
Portuguese. Fifty odd years ago it was the English tongue that again
brought that message of life to them. But as I mingled among Japanese
Christians of different communions and heard them pray, they were not
praying in Portuguese nor in English. They had no thought that He was a
Portuguese Saviour they prayed to, nor yet an English. _They prayed in
Japanese_. They felt that Jesus spoke their tongue. He belonged to them.
He and they understood each other.

As I listened to Manchu and Chinese, to Korean and Hawaiian pour out
their hearts in prayer, I could feel the close personal burning touch of
their spirits with Jesus. They and He were kin to each other. Their
very voices told the certainty in their hearts on this point.

I recall a little old bent-over woman of seventy-odd years up in
northern Sweden, a Laplander. She had come a long three days' journey on
her snow-shoes to the meetings. Night after night as I talked through
interpretation her deep-set black eyes glowed and glowed. But when one
night an hour or more was spent in voluntary prayer she needed no
interpreter. And as I listened I needed none. I _felt_ that she _knew_
that _Jesus spoke Lappish_. The two were face to-face in closest touch
of spirit.

And so it is everywhere. The flaxen-haired Holland maid kneeling by her
single cot _knows_ that Jesus talks Dutch, and her homely hearthfire
Dutch, too, at that. And the earnest Polish peasant in his Carpathian
cabin bowed before the symbol his eyes have known from infancy is
talking into an ear that knows both Polish accent and Polish heart. So
with the German of the Saxon highlands, and of the simpler speech of the
Teutonic lowlands. So with the olive-skinned Latin and the darker-hued
African kneeling on opposite sides, north and south, of the great
Central-earth Sea. Wherever knowledge of Jesus has been carried, He is
_recognized_ and claimed _as their own_ regardless of national or social
lines.

I knew a minister of our Southland, but whose public service took him to
all parts of our country. He had been reared in the South and knew the
coloured people by heart, and loved them. And when he returned to his
Southern home town he would frequently preach for the coloured people.