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Foreign Missions 211 Evolution [he writes] implies a movement perfectly coherent in every portion of it. It is one therefore which can be traced in all its parts by the mind — one in which we, as intelligent agents, are partakers, first, as diligently inquiring into it; second, as con- currently active under it, and third, as in no inconsiderable degree modifying its results. . . . The secret of evolution lies here — We always lie under the creative hand at the centre of creative forces. . . . We are constantly speaking of the eternal and immutable character of truth. . . . These adjectives are hardly applicable. The universe does not tarry in its nest. It is ever becoming another and superior product. . . . We must accept the truth as giving uS directions of thought, axes of growth, and no final product whatever. A third great factor in destroying the isolation of Christian- ity from hiiman life, worthy to be mentioned with Biblical criticism and the theory of evolution, was the wide-spreading interest in the foreign missionary enterprise. The various monographs in the excellent American Church History series indicate that missions share with education and the federation of the sects the chief interest of the denominational life of this period. An increasingly large number of intelligent men and women went into the lands "occupied" by other religions for the sake of Christianizing them. They returned frequently with the reports of their activity, their successes, and their difficulties. The chief difficulty which confronted them in the civilized lands of the East was t^ie firmly rooted conceptions and emotions at the base of Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucian- ism, and Mohammedanism. It became borne in upon the Christian consciousness that Christianity and religion were not synonymous. Before they realized it, the churches were face to face with the discipline of "Comparative Religion" — what Nash called "the most significant debate the world has ever known."' James Freeman Clarke, one of the tenderest and truest ministers of Jesus in New England, composed a series of Lowell lectures on Ten Great Religions (1871) which went through at least twenty -two editions, and brought a knowledge of the high aspirations of other reUgious leaders to Christian people. Toward the end of our period, the World's Parliament of Religions, held in conjunction with the Columbian Exposi- tion in Chicago, composed of representatives of ten religions, ' Ethics and Revelation, p. 92.