It would be slow work. Then so much the more reason for not wasting time! It was dangerous work. What had that to do with it? It was difficult work. Then so much the more were brave hearts zealous to share in it!
These thoughts came slowly and gradually with compelling force to just a few here and there as the years rolled on. And the nineteenth century gave its long thin line of knights to the new Crusade of Love. They were the advance guard of the new army, and right bravely did they do their work. No Moslems wanted them, no Government encouraged them, few even protected them, most of the great Moslem countries were shut and barred and bolted against them.[[1]]
They took their lives in their hands, they spent long years in study, they mastered the hardest languages in the world and harnessed them for the Gospel, translating the Bible and providing Christian literature. They prayed open doors that were closed, they quietly stole through any that were ajar. Some willingly laid down their lives, more sacrificed their health, all faced lives of apparent failure, confident that in the end the cause of love must triumph.
The Spirit of Christ in the 19th Century.
This era of modern Moslem missions is but another evidence, perhaps the strongest of all, of the spirit to which, in this last hundred years, most wonderful of all in history, Christian men and women have opened their hearts.
The spirit that stopped the slave trade, that reformed our prisons, that regulated our factories, that multiplied our hospitals, that sent Livingstone to Africa, Coleridge Patteson to the South Seas, and Selwyn to New Zealand, that inspired Barnardo and General Booth, that nerves thousands of workers in the slums of our great cities, is the same spirit that impels Christian missionaries forth to the Moslem world to-day.
And what is this spirit? May we not dare to say that it is born of a new understanding of a Life lived among the hills and valleys of Galilee, and a Cross raised on a lonely hill outside Jerusalem nineteen centuries ago? There, at the centre of world-history, men learned to look up into the face of God and say 'Our Father,' and then look out upon mankind and call them 'brothers,' and gazing on that Cross see there the World's Redemption, the Son of God lifted up that He might draw all men to Himself. Every dark corner of the earth, every place of pain and sickness, every haunt of sin and shame, every falsehood and every half-truth seen in that light is but a challenge to the Christian, to lift up Him Who is the Lord of Life and Light and Glory, to catch His Spirit that He may be once more incarnate in the Life of His Church.
So it has been for very many of us in the Great War. It has seemed that so many of the things He died for are at stake—liberty and love and gentleness and the sympathy that appreciates the aspirations of other peoples. And our men and women too have gladly given their lives and yielded of their best that the eternal things might win through and that other generations may live in a better world.
And when peace comes to us again, the same call will be there—less strident but no less urgent—summoning every true man to give his life for the world's cleansing, to follow as he may the great Redeemer, who redeemed men by His cross. The ultimate test of Englishmen will be those years of peace. Will there then be a great uprising to the truly holy war of love and unselfish service and the great adventure of the Cross—the war against sin and injustice, against social and national wrong, the war for love and truth and purity and the kingdom of Jesus Christ?