of that hour. "If it be possible, let this cup pass from Me!" But it was while pouring his heart in prayer to the Father that He was able to say, "Nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt." Have we personal fears, weaknesses and temptations, let us lay them before God in our closets. Are there hindrances, difficulties in our work that seem to us insurmountable, the place to overcome is in our closets. It is here we learn that "it is not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the Lord." Are we called to carry burdens that weigh down our spirits, let us in our closets cast these burdens, as we are bidden, on the Lord, and He will sustain us.

Notice next: It is as we hold communion with God in prayer that He condescends to give us revelations of Himself, of His glory, and of His truth. It was as Jesus was praying at the time of His baptism that heaven was opened, and the Spirit descended in a bodily shape live a dove upon Him, and a voice came from heaven which said, "This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased." The transfiguration took place when He went up into a mountain to pray. It is stated, that as He prayed, the fashion of His countenance was altered, and His raiment was white and glistening. It was as Paul and Silas prayed and sang praises in the quiet and solitude of the midnight hour that God's power and glory were manifested in the old prison at Philippi. It was as John was in the spirit on the Lord's Day, that he

heard behind him a great voice, as of a trumpet, and that he saw the exalted Christ walking the midst of the seven golden candlesticks. The conditions of these heavenly visions are the same to-day as in other times. It was said of the Comforter, that when He should come He would take of the things of Christ, and show them to us. Spiritual truths are to be spiritually discerned. The natural eye cannot see them; the natural ear cannot hear them. "Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him. But God hath revealed them unto us by His spirit, for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea the deep things of God."

The Abiding Presence.

Brethren, let it become an abiding conviction with us that nearness to God and fellowship with Him are necessary conditions of purity in our lives, of power in our preaching, of clear visions of divine truth, and of victory in our work. Engaged as we are in Christian work, we cannot ask to be free from all care, to be relieved from all burdens, to be led

along paths that have in them no thorns, or to be brought to the end of a life that has known no struggles or battles. But we do want to make real to ourselves the abiding presence of God. Then, like Moses, we can endure, as seeing Him who is invisible; and, like Paul, we can glory in our infirmities, that the power of God may rest upon us.

Letter to the President.

The following letter in regard to education in our Island possessions is self-explanatory:

To HIS EXCELLENCY,

The President of the United States: The great additions to the responsibilities of our Government, in connection with Porto Rico, Hawaii, and the Philippine Islands, have brought to our door the duty of deciding upon some system of public education by which the peoples of those islands may be fitted for such civil responsibilities as are required of them by the genius of our form of government. In doing this it is already apparent that the spirit and the effects of former relations to a government entirely different from ours will project themselves into the relations with our Government with

great force and persistence.

It is not to be expected that either the ecclesiastical leaders or the untrained peoples will be able at once to see the wisdom of our American idea of separating civil from ecclesiastical affairs. It was naturally to be expected that they would desire a continuation of the old relations, and make a strong effort to hinder the acceptance of any other.

In view of these facts we, the Executive Board of the American Baptist Home Mission Society, desire on behalf of our four million Baptists, to enter our most earnest exhortation to you to have faith in the idea which in this country has enabled the State to have the benefit of an educational system, and at the same time has made it possible for the different churches to profit by it equally without friction or contention.

We remind you of those chapters of our history where the State has persistently and triumphantly maintained its idea of the independence of the churches; those which record the growth of the same idea from Roger Williams' first experiment in the Charter of Rhode Island on to its expression in the Constitution of the United States, and those in which the States themselves have confirmed the wisdom of it by their action.

A great multitude of intelligent citizens of our country hold very sacredly the principle that any union of Church and State is wrong, and always harmful in results, however flattering the immediate effects may seem to be. We therefore most solemnly assure you that no amount of difficulty avoided, and no time saved in completing the system by some other plan, will be a compensation for any sacrifice of the American principle of entire separation of Church and State.

Our ancestors fought for that principle. Our people have been well satisfied with its operation. Any variation from it will be a denial of great blessing to the new country, and an insidious danger to our home institutions.

We urge upon you to be constant and loyal in the defense and propagation of that principle. That you may have the grace to do so will be our prayer.

Rev. L. J. Dyke's Ten Years' Work
in Oklahoma.

Rev. L. J. Dyke was appointed General Missionary to Oklahoma in June, 1890, within. a year after the opening of the Territory, and in that capacity continued until the fall of 1900, when the new plans of co-operation went into effect. He experienced many of the hardships and difficulties incident to pioneer missionary work, but heroically and joyously gave himself unstintedly to the task of establishing Baptist churches, building meeting houses, and doing everything incidental thereto, so successfully that he leaves many living monuments of his indefatigable labors. In response to our special request for a summary of his work during this formative period in the history of the Territory he has placed at or disposal a brief statement from which we make the following extracts:

"For four years of the ten and one-half that I have been here, my appointment covered Indian Territory, as well as Oklahoma. In this time I have seen the several additions to Oklahoma of the Cheyenne and Arapahoe country, the Cherokee strip, the Pattawatomie the Sac and the Fox, the Iowa and the Shaw

nee Reservations. When my work began, Oklahoma was comprehended in five counties embracing about 2,500 square miles. At that time I could drive over the entire field in a few weeks, which I did many times, staying with the people in their dug-outs and sod houses, sharing with them in their coarse fare, often sleeping on the open prairie under my buggy, and having all the peculiar experiences of a pioneer missionary. From this small beginning Oklahoma has now come to assume much larger proportions. We now have a Territory of twenty-five organized counties, besides the Kiowa and Comanche, Wichita and Osage Reservations, measuring more than 32,000 square miles, and embracing a population of 400,000. When I began, we had in Oklahoma one Baptist meeting-house, 20 x 30 feet, built of cotton-wood boards. Now we have nearly one hundred comfortable houses, costing from $500 to $5,000.

"At that time there were possibly fifty church organizations embracing white and colored. Now we have more than three hundred. Then we had two men giving their time to the ministry, a few other farmerpreachers made up our preaching force. Since that time, principally through the aid of the Home Mission Society, we have had the services of a large number of excellent men, many of them college and seminary men, through whose agency we have built up strong churches, so that to-day we are in the lead of all the denominations.

"Of my own personal work. I have planned and aided in building fifty-five meeting houses; have organized something more than fifty churches; have had supervision of the Negro work; also superintended the organizing and building of most of our Indian missions.

"To give the details of all this work, in all these years, would require a large volume."

It may be added that the erection of nearly every one of the fifty-five meeting houses named was made possible by the timely aid of the Home Mission Society, and that many of our strongest churches in Oklahoma are what they are because of such aid.

Plea for Home Missions.* The report which your Committee on Home Missions now begins to submit is liable to pass beyond the coolness of mere statement into the warmth of a plea. For sixty-eight years the Baptist Home Mission Society has wrought,

* Report of Committee on Home Missions, presented at Yarmouth, Me., September 27, by Rev. H. W. Tilden, D.D.

with ever-increasing power and usefulness until it has come to be a colossal Christianizing agency which has aroused the admiration and gratitude of all Baptists, not to say all Christians, of our land.

It was born in the hearts of mighty men of God, whose outreaching missionary spirit determined that there should be "no limits to their exertions except the boundaries of the great and extensive country "-i. e., North America-in which it was their "happiness to live." And even these wide limits have, of late, been extended until the field seems almost without bounds. The missionary spirit is always moving outward from the Jerusalem of its beginning toward the remoter portions of the race. It seeks all men as the eagle seeks the sun. The open door in Cuba and in the Philippines has called us peremptorily to enter and take possession for Christ, and, more speedily than we think, we may be led into South America, where the fields are fast whitening to the harvest. But it is to be hoped that the interest in the new fields may not lessen, but rather intensify, the effort upon the old central fields of North America, where the main battle for God is to be fought.

Au Expanding Society.

The Home Mission Society, wonderful to tell, has, from the very start, been the close and constant companion of the interior expansion of our nation. It was brought into existence for this purpose. From the first there has been an exciting race between the pressing religious needs of an ever-extending frontier and the attempts of the Society to supply them. During its history scarcely a territory has been settled, or a State born into the Union, apart from the influence of its missionaries. As bold emigrants, one by one, or company by company, have left their Eastern homes and pushed their way to the untenanted soil of the West, there to grapple with untamed nature and encounter nameless privations, our devoted home missionaries have pressed on hard after them, intent on giving them the means of grace which could keep their hearts fixed upon the God of their earlier days and deliver their lives from the debasement of their rustic struggle. And as the rude prairies, here and there, have been smoothed into shape by cultivation, or the forests have bowed before the gleaming ax, in the wood huts and log cabins along the track of such work, by the influence of these

men of God, the voice of prayer and praise has been lifted and the humble chapel of worship has been erected. Thousands of virgin settlements thus made redolent of Christian sentiment dot our Western States, like grains of black pepper upon white paper. The extent of the work done by this honored Society is simply amazing. No human gauge can measure, no statistics can tell, the amount of uplifting influence which this Society has exerted upon the newer portions of our beloved country. You can no more compute the amount of saving health which it has infused into these Western populations than you can unbraid the sunbeams from this year's harvests. Its motherly hands have reached out on the lines of deepest need and healingly touched the most diseased spots of society and of the land. By the mighty force thus wielded, devouring evils have been held off, and sobriety and godliness have been made to abound.

Some Weighty Figures.

Two millions of sermons have been preached by its 25,000 commissioned preachers and teachers. More than 5,000,000 of visits have been made to families and individuals, and 163,000 persons have been baptized. It is evangelizing, teaching, and housing the lost, the ignorant, the destitute of mankind. It has a share in supporting and guiding more than thirty schools among Negroes and Indians and Mexicans. It preaches the gospel to twenty different nationalities, and it is lifting the roof of shelter over many companies of unhoused believers in every part of the land, and in the islands of the sea. These faithful messengers of the Cross have gone to the wigwams of the savage, to the cabins of the black man, and to the adobes of the Mexican, and. as a result, we have Baptists in red, Baptists in black, and Baptists in yellow, as well as Baptists in white; and Negro scholars and statesmen and authors are rising to public view, and once red handed Indian chiefs have stood in our pulpits and before Christian assemblages and meekly told how they had found "the Jesus road," and begged for more missionaries to be sent to their yet unconverted tribes.

A Heroic Band.

It is with profound gratitude that we remember the noble men that have served and are now serving the Lord under the direction of this Society. It is doubtful it as large a number of Christian workers, anywhere under

earthly skies, for the same length of time, have endured more hardships for Christ's sake, conquered more formidable difficulties, or achieved more good than the tens of thousands who have labored under the direction of the American Baptist Home Mission Society for the sixty-eight years of its history. The list of their names is a roll of modern heroes. They “had an understanding of the times to know what Israel ought to do." They have directly besieged the town of Mansoul. They have invented no philosophies, made no achivements in criticism, but they have brought home to multitudes of hearts the transforming power of the gospel. They have striven to set right the central essence of the person. The pungent realities of grace have occupied their whole attention. The fight with evil has been too sharp and constant to permit digressions. The work of the Society now is as thorough and evangelical as it has been in the past, and the missionaries of the present are not less self-forgetful and devoted than their prede

cessors.

New Work to Be Done.

And the work yet to be done is even more important than any that has been done. New towns are starting up all over the great West even as green tips spring to sight one after another on the lately sown grain-field. These vast tracts of fertile land are destined in due time to swarm with human abodes. Already there is great lack of gospel influences. A few years ago there were in Iowa 350 communities without Baptist churches, and half of these without churches of any kind. In Nebraska there were 800 places left to Baptist care, lacking the gospel. One hundred of these places had churches without pastors. In Kansas there were sixteen whole counties, 11,000 square miles, without a single Baptist church. In Colorado there were scores of towns recognized on the map which are totally destitute of all religious privileges.

The result of letting all these thousands of communities grow up without the gospel is well known. The Louisiana purchase must be repurchased with a price that is priceless. Beyond the Mississippi lies the Armageddon of the final strife. The intellectual climate is tropical. The play of conflicting opinions is rapid and gleaming. The West is no longer "wild and woolly," but wise and wicked. sturdy work to mold it to the Saviour's law. It will require men of parts as well as of piety.

It is

The West was never more plastic to a touch that is both sound and strong. The powers of wickedness have astutely located themselves here because victories gained here are worth more than anywhere else in the world. The Mississippi valley is the thigh of the nation. Let this be dislocated and we tumble to ruin. But let Jesus Christ conquer here and the victory will spread to the extremities of our dear land. Some of the best people in the world live west of the Mississippi River and some of the worst; but the good ones alone cannot take care of the bad. "Men of Israel, help!”

These reflections bring home again the question of duty. We must see that fresh floods of light need to be sent upon the dark problems of the Southland. Patient, winning love is due to the warring tribes of red men. Firm resistance must be made to Romish encroachments upon our liberties. And with what a whirlwind of Christian love should we break in upon those foreign communities scattered through our great country, where no American accent is uttered, no American idea cherished, with the Bible in our hands, the English language upon our tongues, and the starry flag

above our heads.

The West.

Western Baptists are grateful for what has been done for them by Eastern friends, through the Home Mission Society. The West is the daughter of the East. It is your children that are peopling the vast tracts of our country's occident. The daughter is getting to be larger than the mother. She is very queenly; you will be proud of her some day; but she still needs you more than ever, as growing daughters always need their mothers. Baptists of Maine and of New England, if you could only know what your Christian benefaction has done for the West, you would forget the sacrifices already made, and thank God for the opportunity of sending your money with your sons and daughters to this most important and hopeful region. No Christian can look upon the whitening fields before the Home Mission Society without being intoxicated with the desire for their immediate occupation by the servants of Christ.-Zion's Advocate.

Northern Minnesota.

Your district missionary is becoming more and more in love with this northern part of the State, where it is his privilege to labor. There is always something fascinating about

If

a new country. And this country is new. any one doubts it, a few weeks living in log shacks, not as good as an Eastern hen roost, will convince him. Other things, too, will convince him ere he has slept many nights on a hard bunk, with sundry small companions, and with the atmosphere outside thirty degrees below zero, and chinks between the logs like cracks in an Indian tepee. Yes, it is a new, but it is a great country, and is being rapidly settled. At present there are good claims to be had all along the Canada Northern, from Warroad to Rainy River, and down in the Big Fork Country; but at the rate settlers are coming from Canada, Iowa and other States, there will be no land to homestead in a year or two. The soil near Warroad, and on down to Rainy, is a rich, black, sandy loam, with clay subsoil. The Government is just now opening this part of the State to settlers. Warroad is on the Canadian Northern Railroad, a new line just being put through from Winnipeg to Port Arthur. It is seven miles from the Canada line, and at the southwest corner of the Lake of the Woods where the War River flows in. The river and bay afford a good anchorage, and the Government has granted money to open the harbor and build a lighthouse. Then with only twentyfive miles of canal and locks on Rainy River, the lake vessels can sail right to this place. When this is brought about Warroad will become a large city, with great elevators and much shipping, for it is the farthest point west on the Lakes for traffic from the wheat fields of all this northwest. A new line of railway is projected to Grand Forks, and the present line runs away west of Winnipeg. Inability to prove up and platt the town has been a hindrance to growth, but this will be removed inside another month, I am told. At present, the population is floating to a large extent; but it is not unlikely that inside one year there will be over 1,000 inhabitants.

Well, your missionary was the first to visit this place, and the outlook is promising for a Baptist church and good house of worship in a few months. The settlers are nearly all American or English speaking, and there is a very friendly feeling manifested toward the Baptists. Land, and material to build a church on it, are offered, and we trust to crystalize things in a few weeks so as to organize a church.

The need and the hunger for the gospel makes one's heart ache. Think of people who have not heard a gospel sermon for six years, whose children have had no school and no teaching from the Word, who have such

longing to know the truth that night after night they walk to the meetings over six miles. We now have a Sunday school and day school, and hope to continue preaching here every few weeks until a pastor can be secured and the work settled on a solid foundation. Any church or Sunday school able to contribute singing books, Sunday school books, or papers they have used, will find the undersigned welcoming any such help if sent to him at Detroit, Minn., or to Warroad, Minn. Trusting these items may interest some one, I remain,

LYMAN H. STEINHOFF.

Italian Immigration and Missions.

BY ARIEL BELLONDI.

Immigration from Italy has been heavy during the last four or five years, and now the numbers are greater on account of hard times in Southern Europe, and the existing reports of great prosperity in America. The record at the Barge Office in New York for this last year shows the passing of 341,712 immigrants, of whom190,019 were Italians, 82,329 coming from South Italy and 16,690 from the North; 40,224 are illiterate. Such immigration brought to this country $1,094,171, each person from the North bringing here an average of $22.40, and from the South $9.03. Sixty-five per cent. of the Italians stop in the large cities.

The population of New Jersey was increased in a year by 10,000 Italians. Take a far-away city-for instance, Denver, Colo.— in three years the Italian population reached the number of 12,000. Before the Presidential election I was often asked if the Italian is a source of political danger. It must be remembered that the Italians have loved liberty longer than the Anglo-Saxons. They are of the blood of Mazzini and Garibaldi. While England was ruled by despotism, Venice and Florence were republics. Italians are generally Republicans. They are assimilated quickly into the political American ways. I have visited many public schools near the Italian colonies, and they were crowded with Italian children. Once I asked a class of about fifty children, of whom most were Italian, how many of them were Italians. Two arose. And when I asked, How many Americans? all arose.

I have been much pleased in my last visit to several of our Italian missions to note the marked progress in the Sabbath schools, especially those of Buffalo, N. Y., Newark and Orange, N. J. This year, more than ever,