THE CRITICAL MOMENT.

Dominion, Volume 6, Issue 1560, 2 October 1912, Page 4

THE CRITICAL MOMENT.

ME. BRYCE AND FOREIGN MISSIONS. Mr. James Bryce, British Ambassador at Washington, who lately visited Australia, delivered nimself recently of the following pregnant remarks oil foreign missions:— "Our material civilisation is permeating every part of the earth, and telling, as it never told before, upon every one of the non-Christian peoples, in another 50 years that which wo call our. civilisation will have overspread the earth and extinguished the native customs owl organisations of the savage and semi-civiiisod peoples. Unless these backward races receive some new moral basis of life, some beliefs and precepts by which they lian live, something to control their bad impulses and help them to form worthy conceptions ot life and work, their last state will ba worse than the first. "This, then, >s the- critical moment at which we are bound, since we have destroyed the old things, to replace them by new things of a better kind, to give something by which they may order their life, and through which they may begin a truer-progress than was. possible under their unclean, ways. And what .we give we must give by example as well as by precept; by showing that what our missionaries teach is the rule of our • own conduct, both as governors and as private l>er.sons. JPh.cre is needed a revival of tha true spirit of the Gospel among Christian nations, *in order that they should fulfil their Christian obligations to those who are passing under their control and influence. The moment is critical and. the duty is clear. We are becoming, in some countries we have already become, responsible before God for our . treatment of the-* backward and non-Christian peoples. We are bound to provide- them with a new foundation of life instead of that wh'ch.is crumbling beneath them. Let the Gospel 'of. Christ'come to them, not as a. crushing, force in the hands of their destroyers, not'as being tho mere nominal profession of those who ore grasping their land and trying to profit by their labour. "L°J; it come as a beneficent power which can fill their hearts with new thoughts and new hopes; which may beconv; a link between them and ourselves, helping thorn forward and averting those conflicts and suffering which will.otherwise follow; a bond between all races oi mankind 'of whatever Llood. or sneeeh. nr colour: a sacred bond to make them f«jl iiiirl believe, that we- and they are all the children of one-Father in Heaven."