SUCCESS, REAL AND APPARENT.
It is often difficult, not to say impossible, to know just what success has been achieved by any special missionary effort. After years of faithful labor the missionary, if challenged to do so, may not be able to adduce a single satisfactory proof that he has not labored wholly in vain, so far as the results he has been seeking are concerned.
On the other hand, changes so remarkable, so exactly in the line of what is sought and hoped for, follow the very first proclamation of the Gospel, which we gladly attribute to Divine grace; we grow confident that at last the promise is nearing its fulfilment when “a nation shall be born in a day.”
Now, it should be understood that we are in danger of mistake as to the real condition of things in each case; a mistake which breeds despair where there may be good reason for rejoicing, or excites hopes that are fatally false on the other hand.
Doubtless many a faithful toiler has spent his whole life in laying foundations, deep and broad, but out of the sight of ordinary observers, upon which shall rise, in magnificent proportions, a temple to our God after he has gone to his reward—to the reward of one who has been faithful, rather than of one who has been observed. The merest accident may place another in such relation to this man’s toils that he shall seem to be the creator of all the results for which he labored, while he bears no other relation to them than the minnow does to the swell and roar and irresistible rush of the wave by which it has been caught and upon which it rides.
Again, men possessed of certain gifts, but devoid of needed restraints in their use, may arouse the enthusiasm of their fellows, sway their passions, play upon their imaginations, excite their emotions and propel them along certain lines of activity until confidence is created that now, at last, the kingdom is coming with millennial celerity and power. But a reaction from all this is certain, and the Gospel ship which just now was riding with grace and beauty upon the crest of the wave lies half buried in mud and sea-weed to await the rising of another tide. The whole movement has been that of an anchored boat, without the possibility of advance, and worse than useless, for in this case it has been with the waste of spiritual force.
There are two facts which all who are laboring for the coming of the kingdom of our Lord should regard as fixed, and being fixed some good degree of fixedness will be secured for their hopes with reference to its progress. One of these is the amazing ignorance and wickedness of those over whom this kingdom of light and love is to be established; and the other is the Divine power of that kingdom and the Divine purpose to establish it, and hence the certainty of its establishment.
The Gospel will never gain its conquests in such way as to relieve the Church of the duty and labor and self-denial and discipline of carrying it and proclaiming it to the heathen, who will find it, as all people have, opposed to all their habits and pleasures and traditions, and will, therefore, when they understand it, resist it before accepting it. The cheering news which so often comes to us from Central Africa and other lands will doubtless be followed by most discouraging news of disappointment and seeming disaster.
On the other hand, it must be remembered that in all really substantial buildings, especially if erected on doubtful ground, a large proportion of the cost and of the most valuable material, and also of the time, must be expended out of sight before it becomes a feature of the landscape.
In all religious movements it is especially true that much of the best material, and much of the cost, is utterly lost to sight before the world sees any result. In the South, for the past fifteen years, the foundations have been laid for a superstructure which is to arise in grand and glorious proportions, the joy of our land and the praise of all people. We are just reaching the surface, and others than the workmen themselves are now able to see that something has been going on during all these years.
If structures, however beautiful, which have no foundations, must topple, and we should feel no disappointment when they do, we would yet understand that much has been done when a foundation broad enough and strong enough has been laid.
The work will go on now with apparently tenfold rapidity, for, since it attracts attention it will also attract helpers, and those who doubted and sneered will co-operate in carrying it forward.