call with a large salary, and there would not have been anything impossible
to him in the matters of religious work or Christian achievement had he
tarried in his native land. But nothing could detain him from the work to
which God called him years before he became a Christian. My reason for
writing that anomalous statement is that when a boy in Sabbath-school at
Boundbrook, New Jersey, he read a Library book, entitled "The Life of Henry
Martyn, the Missionary," and he said to our mother, "Mother! when I grow up
I am going to be a missionary!" The remark made no especial impression at
the time. Years passed on before his conversion. But when the grace of God
appeared to him, and he had begun his study for the ministry, he said one
day, "Mother! Do you remember that many years ago I said, 'I am going to be
a missionary'?" She replied, "Yes! I remember you said so." "Well," said
he, "I am going to keep my promise." And how well he kept it millions of
souls on earth and in heaven have long since heard. But his chief work is
yet to come. We get our chronology so twisted that we come to believe that
the white marble of the tomb is the mile-stone at which a good man stops,
when it is only a mile-stone on a journey, the most of the miles of which
are yet to be travelled.

The Dictionary which my brother prepared with more than two decades of
study, the religious literature he transferred from English into Chinese,
the hymns he wrote for others to sing, although himself could not sing at
all, (he and I monopolizing the musical incapacity of a family in which all
the rest could sing well), the missionary stations he planted, the life he
lived, will widen out, and deepen and intensify through all time and all
eternity.

I am glad that those competent to tell of his magnificent work have
undertaken it. You could get nothing about it from him at all. Ask him a
question trying to evoke what he had done for God and the church, and his