The American Citizen

CLERGYMAN.

"God Has Expanded Us," Says Bishop C. H. Fowler.

A Powerful Sermon on Expansion and the Duties of the Hour, Preached by the Noted Methodist Divine.

All men now begin to recognize the providential character of Abraham Lincoln. We see him as one of God's prophets.

History repeats itself. One generation stones the prophets, and the next, their children, build them monuments. Only a few souls have the intuition to recognize a living prophet. These prophets neither dress nor act like the old prophets; that would be mere charlatanism.

Every prophet must be fitted into his own time, suit his own environment. One comes as a pilgrim, like Abraham; another as a hired man and herdsman, like Jacob; another as a leader and lawgiver, like Moses. Another as a warrior, like Joshua: another as an executioner, like Elijah; another as a scholar, like Paul; each man fitting his own age.

To find a prophet, we must not take the grave clothes of the dead seers, and run through the mart, trying to find some man whom they will fit. We must so read events as to recognize the man who fits and fills his time. He must be in league with events. Napoleon on St. Helena said: "At Waterloo events deserted me." He dropped out of the nick of time. The prophet must be a history maker. To find our prophet, we must find the trend of events; then we can easily find the hand that is making the bend in the stream of history.

This hand we find in the White House. President McKinley may not fit the clothes of the old prophets, but he is fitting the trend of events in this age. He so stands in the midst of the world's forces that he reaches results in civilization. He is bending the streams of history in the right direction. Sink down into the undercurrent, down below the party strife on the surface, down into the great stream that sweeps on through the sea of the centuries bearing the races up to higher latitudes and levels, and catch the moral forces that are evolving the world's destiny, and you will find that this statement is not politics, but religion—God's religion, that moves always on in one direction.

The three greatest missionary events of the Christian era since the crucifixion of Jesus are: First, the conversion of St. Paul. This opened the door to the Gentiles; this was our chance. Second, the firing on Fort Sumter. This made the Saxon race fit for evangelical uses. Third, the blowing up of the Maine. This unified the nation and sent us out about our work.

It melted the American elements in the furnace of war, and made all Americans one. The son of Gen. Grant and the nephew of Gen. Lee marched side by side under one flag and against a common enemy.

These Saxons are said to be bad neighbors. We have some dark spots in our history. The Saxon sometimes has made a bad record. Yet it must also be said that we have never enslaved a race, without leaving it freer than it was before we enslaved it. For the ages through and the world around, there can be found no such liberties anywhere else as are found under the Stars and Stripes.

The blowing up of the Maine was an eye-opener to us, and soon to all the world. Our great Washington (we should never speak his name but to honor it), our great Washington said to us, as a little strip of Atlantic colonies, "Beware of foreign entanglements." It was the height of wisdom. It suited our infancy like a bib. He pinned this bib upon us and said, "Keep in the middle of the lot, or the boys on the next lot will throw mud on your bib." So we kept in the middle of the lot, and grew till we outgrew the lot. We grew from three millions to seventy-five millions. The bib was too small for us. It looked like a cotton patch on the breast of our uniform. We had more beefsteaks and silk dresses, more spelling books and New Testaments, to the thousand people, than could be found anywhere else in the world.

We were as much under obligations to help the poorer and more ignorant races as ever. St. Paul was to go "far hence to the Gentiles": but we stuck to our Atlantic waters, coasted by our shores, we held on to our little bib, contented, expecting to stay always in our western waters.

But one day the Spanish touched off a magazine under us. Then the jig was up. Come what might, we must fight to the finish. We went up into the air, and came down everywhere—to stay.

This sent us out about our providential job; this made missionaries of us. We are in Manila. We are ready to help China.

God has expanded us: we can't help it. You might as well try to catch yonder eagle perched on a crag of the mountains, pluming his pinions to wrestle with the whirlwind, and then try to crowd him back into the little eggshell out of which he has broken, as to try to throttle this American race and crowd it back into the thirteen original colonies. Some of the old gentlemen on that old soil of some of those old thirteen colonies, who have never left it, may think it would be a good thing for our great continent-embracing people to come back home. But it is impossible.

God has expanded us.

Long years ago, back in the forties, Thomas H. Benton, United States Senator from Missouri, standing in his place in the Senate, pleading for a Pacific railroad, pointed toward the setting sun and cried: "See there, gentlemen, there is the East!"

To-day we catch up our papers and look through the Golden Gate for the East, the far East. The ages are rolled together at our feet.

We are standing by the cradle of China; she is asking us for deliverance. She has caught the vision of a Northern Bear "that walks like a man," and she is asking America to save her.

CHARLES H. FOWLER, D. D.

Buffalo, N. Y.