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60 HISTORY OF THE PARLIAMENT. ton, Honolulu. Papers had been prepared by some of the new and minor sects of India which did not expect to have personal representation in the Parliament. Hon. James G. Blaine and his successor, Hon. John W. Foster of the State Department at Washington, and some of the Foreign Ministers and Consuls of the United States had been courteously helpful to the Gen- eral Committee, and procured for them the attention of for- eign governments. A number of intelligent travelers, among them Rev. Francis E. Clark, D.D., President of the Christian Endeavor Society, had gone around the globe and spoken of the plans which were so soon to be consummated, and when, in the first week of September, some of the Oriental delegates arrived in Chicago, and were welcomed with every expression of fraternal regard, the Chairman and his associates felt that their hopes and dreams were nearing fulfilment, and they looked forward to the opening meeting on the eleventh of Sep- tember as certain to mark a new epoch in the religious history of mankind. Such was his confidence that he had been work- ing along the lines of Divine Providence, that the Chairman went so far as to express the conviction that, within a hundred years, pilgrims from many lands would flock to the scenes of the World's First Parliament of Religions, in the unhistoric City of Chicago, almost as they have for centuries flocked to Westminster Abbey, St. Peter's Church, and the Holy Shrines of Jerusalem. There were times when the obstacles to the assembling of a World's Religious Congress seemed almost insurmountable. The Committee's appeal was usually made to individuals and not to organizations, and though this gave the appeal certain obvious advantages, the Committee could not depend for the successful accomplishment of their plans on the vote and cooperation of ecclesiastical bodies. Many of the great con- gresses of 1893, like the Evangelical Alliance, the Temperance and Denominational Congresses, were backed by organized boards and societies. The Parliament could make its appeal to those individuals whose breadth of view, catholicity of temper, full confidence in the power of truth to bear the full