We need public spirit in ourselves and the purpose and power to evoke it in others. When Admiral Foote, in eastern waters, invited a native prince to dine with him on his flagship, and himself said grace, the heathen remarked: "That is what the missionaries do." "Well," said the gruff but godly admiral, "I, too, am a missionary." Would that in matters of our community life we might all be missionaries! Honor the missionary and the work which missionaries are at this moment accomplishing in the civilization of our human brothers in foreign parts. Honor the social missionary, who, braving the gibes and contumely of the so-called "cultivated," espouses the cause of the poor, and on the platform, in the press, or by personal work, proves his love for untitled humanity in its struggles against forbidding social conditions. The world painfully needs two more classes of missionaries still social missionaries to the rich, and political missionaries. Where are the young men and women of means and leisure who will duly study the social problems of our time and help to their solution? Where are the consecrated sons and daughters of wealth ready to preach to their peers the obligations resting upon them? Where are the men who will covet political careers with an evangelical spirit, preparing for and, if possible, entering public life with a determination to make it purer and more efficient, seeking places of trust, competing with selfish schemers for chances to exert great power in the capital affairs of men? May every one who can do good in any of these ways hear the voice which searched the soul of the youthful Buddha: "Oh, thou who are to save, thine hour is nigh; The sad world waiteth in its misery, The blind world stumbleth on its round of pain; Rise, Maya's Son, wake, slumber not again!" CHAPTER XVII MEDICINE AND MORALS QUI UITE possibly the joining of the terms medicine and morals in the title may to some seem strange. The two things so named, not a few more or less intelligent people regard as hopeless incompatibles, each the contradictory opposite of the other, so that if one is present anywhere the other cannot be. Such prejudice is giving way, but it still exists in considerable force. Witness the numbers of people whom no amount of suffering, no threat of death, will induce to call a physician. This temper is unfortunate, destroying useful lives, causing needless pain and fostering baneful illfeeling among men. Spite of isolated high fees to physicians or rewards like the £10,000 voted by Parliament to Edward Jenner in 1802, and the £20,000 voted him in 1807, public regard for the medical calling is too low. No physician save Lister, we believe, has ever yet been made a peer in |