"You may ask why does God restrict Himself to the human instrument in bearing the tidings, and through the tidings the effective result, of the Redemption? I cannot tell you why, but I see that it is so. A light from heaven may overpower a Saul of Tarsus, and he may hear words straight from the ascended Christ. But a Christian man—Ananias—must be sent to tell him how to wash away his sins, and to minister the Holy Spirit to him. An angel may communicate with Cornelius, the Centurion, but he stays his lips from uttering the Gospel of Christ. That privilege is reserved for the human lips of Peter. Is it not sufficient that the Commander has said, 'Go ye'? Had the task been set for angels, it would have been accomplished long since, for they do His pleasure. But He trusted it to us, who might be expected to be so bound by ties of gratitude to His will that we would eagerly spring to do His bidding. And we have miserably failed. 'Is there not another way?' we languidly ask in the face of the command. I do not see another way. But the Lord has most clearly outlined this way: That the Gospel should be preached in all the world to every creature, and that the one who believes and is baptized should be saved. To sit and philosophically consider that an infinite God must surely find some other way if we fail in this, is not reverence for His wisdom. It is mutiny."
Some of the ladies looked startled at this bold setting forth of the case, and remembered how, privately, they had given voice to the sentiments under criticism before coming to the meeting. The Secretary's keen face betrayed thorough assent to what the speaker was saying, and the President was glad that she held such a relation as she did to a cause so evidently right, with a reverse side so evidently wrong. The plain little body of the Church Social beamed thorough sympathy.
"Do you say," continued Mr. Carew, "that God will be merciful to the heathen because of their ignorance? I believe He will, and do not doubt that it will be 'more tolerable' for those who have never heard than for those in this country (heathen also, in the Scriptural sense) who, having often heard, are still rejectors of the Gospel. But there is a greater question involved than that of lessened stripes or mitigated woe. Do you say that men will be saved by lack of knowledge? The prophet said his people perished for lack of it! Ah, if God had ordained ignorance to be the way of salvation He might have spared Himself great cost!—cost of the redemption sacrifice, and of its proclamation, often in martyr blood. But He confers His boon to faith and 'faith cometh by hearing.'
"You say it will increase the responsibility of the heathen if they hear, and put them in worse case if they reject the message? Very true. But had that been a sufficient reason it would have silenced our Lord's 'Go ye' at the outset of the age. Never would the Gospel have traveled to our barbaric fathers, and we should be without hope to-day. But the treasure was too great which the Saviour sought. No thought of deeper shadows cast by the very brightness of the light could deter Him from holding it forth. Beyond all cost of difficulty, danger, or the deepened condemnation of the lost, was the value of the Church He sought—the pearl of great price for which all other possessions might be forfeited! Ah, friends, since the object is so dear to Him, where are our hearts that we think of it so coldly! The burden of my plea is for Him; not for the missionary, not for philanthropy, not even so much for the heathen themselves, as for Him, because He loves and longs to give but lacks the human vessels through which to give!"
The speaker paused, and absently pushed back the hair from his flushed forehead. An almost tragic yearning shone in his deepset eyes. There was one in the congregation whose heart burned in a fellowship of grief over the Saviour's unmet longing. Mr. Carew continued more slowly, in a voice intensely sad and almost broken:
"Do you sometimes quote softly for your comfort, 'I will guide thee with mine eye'? You have thought of His eye upon you—and that is right—to care for, protect and lead. But have you ever watched the glance of His eye with another thought, not for yourself, but for Him? Not to see in it provision and help for you; but to see to what He is looking, for what He is longing—what it is that will give joy to Him? When I look in His eyes," and the speaker was looking far away from his congregation and spoke as though half forgetting them, "I seem to hear Him saying, 'I have other sheep—I must bring them!'"
His voice sank to a whisper. Hubert felt a little convulsive movement beside him and Winifred's hand was shading her eyes. Mr. Carew recovered from the emotion that nearly mastered him, and remembered his hearers and their probable wishes. He began again:
"But perhaps I am neglecting to tell you that which you came especially to hear—some details concerning the actual work of God in China. You will pardon me, but I cannot forbear speaking wherever I go concerning the principles underlying our work, as well as of the work itself. One might describe the people and their ways—and all that is valuable in making them more real to us—and might present a score of curious things which would perhaps beguile an hour very pleasantly, but still leave an indifferent heart unchanged as to the real motive of missions. However, all that I have said will gain and not lose by our turning attention for a time to the practical outworking of the theory."
Then the speaker gave illustrations of the way lost souls are found in China. Very pathetic were some of the incidents, and again and again Winifred's eyes were dim, and an unspeakable pain gnawed at Hubert's heart. Fervently he thanked God for those whose darkness He had turned to light, but sad beyond expression seemed the repeated instances which had occurred in Mr. Carew's experience of earnest pleadings for missionaries to be sent to various places and his absolute inability to answer the cry. But broader than the fact of the wish of some stood the need of all! Populous cities without one witness to the grace of God! Wide regions untraversed by the feet of His messengers! Hubert had thought New Laodicea a place of desperate need; and so it was in the matter of vital, fruit-bearing piety. But as he thought of the inky darkness in which China's millions dwelt this seemed a place of light.
The meeting came to an end. But first the President expressed the thanks of those who had listened to the lecture, and hoped all had been stirred to greater zeal and effort for the future in helping so good a cause. She suggested that the mite-boxes should be redistributed.