74 The Fundamentals the only power which will forgive and regenerate, which will reach down deep enough to transform, and will hold till trans formation is fixed. And Christianity does this by striking down to the indi vidual and saving him. It saves him by the power of God in Christ, working in and upon him. The missionary duty is this duty. “I hold education,” says Uchimura, “as essentially personal and individualistic.” And he uses the term education in its broad sense. There is more to education than this. Society is something more than the sum-total of individuals, but it begins and ends with individuals, and the need of the world is primarily the need of its individuals, and the salva tion of the world in Christ’s way can only be the salvation of its soul through the salvation of its souls. A few years ago we heard a great deal about the need of educating and civilizing the world before we try to change its religion. Dr. George Hamilton advanced this argument in the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1796: “To spread abroad the knowledge of the Gospel among barbarous and heathen nations seems to me to be highly preposterous in as far as it anticipates, nay, as it even reverses the order of nature. Men must be polished and refined in their manners before they can be properly enlightened in religious truths. Philosophy and learning must, in the nature of things, take the precedence. Indeed, it should seem hardly less absurd to make revelation precede civilization in the order' of time, than to pretend to unfold to a child the ‘Principia’ of Newton, ere he is made at all acquainted with the letters of the alphabet. These ideas seem to me alike founded in error; and, therefore, I must consider them both as equally romantic and visionary.” We do not hear so much of this view now. Civilization has shown what a vain and empty thing it is, and we know that the sin and passion in human hearts, which it cannot destroy, are as real and dreadful in America and in all the neutral nations as they are in the nations at war. God is man’s one
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