We are led to look, therefore, to the other end of the line. What is the motive which has moved these stewards of God to turn their benefactions in such directions in so large a measure? Rather, we ask, what is the corresponding providence which has called for them, or the preparation which has been making far away for their wise use, the signs of which were not seen, perhaps, by the givers at the time when they were thus carrying out the Lord’s will? What is the significance of it all in the divine plan?
Is it not that the world is suddenly opening for missionary work as perhaps never before in all its history? that in more than one direction the long twilight which has been slowly creeping over the eastern sky is breaking in a moment into glorious dawn? that the seed which has been growing secretly these many days has come to be the bud, and now is bursting into the flower? Such crises do come in the history of God’s world, in the progress of the Gospel of his Son.
Three illustrations of this truth are just now conspicuous——India is clamoring for the Gospel; missionaries are beset with eager throngs begging for the bread of life; whole villages are calling each for a Christian teacher to come and dwell among them and lead them to the Christ. Thousands have been baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus during the past year. Japan, too, which succeeded in keeping itself secluded from all interference from without until so late a day, has taken down its official threats published at every crossroad against “the Jesus religion,” and, as it throws away its idol gods, is ready to accept either the materialism or the Christianity of Europe and America; and Africa is no longer a region of unexplored darkness, but has been forced to give up its secrets to the Christian explorer as well as to the Arab slave-trader, who heretofore alone has shared them with the aborigines. Africa is known, and already has followed the death-blow to the internal traffic in human life; missionary expeditions are winding along its rivers and across its swamps, and, with the Arab out, the Christian may come in. For us, this last great continent is of peculiar interest, and its opening lends a new and wider meaning and reach to the work we have been patiently doing in the South? Are not these the complementing facts which stand over against those stated first, and which explain them?
God has brought his church into a crisis by which he will try its faith and its faithfulness. He has opened the doors wide for its entrance into new fields. No longer does the missionary have to push himself into the midst of heathendom; but the cry is heard on every side, “Come over and help us.” And then the Lord of both the fields and the fountains has shown us by these illustrious examples of both the living and the dead, how he looks to the men who hold his wealth to administer their trusts, and to lead on the hosts of those who may swell the stream with much or little, as he has prospered them. Will the church of Christ bear the testing? Let us hope that these large gifts are only the great drops which tell us of the coming shower which shall fill all the pools. Nay, rather, let us pray that this may be the beginning of “the latter rain.”
THE RESPONSIBILITY OF ANSWERED PRAYER.
The obligation which comes from offered prayer is apparent. It implies a complete subordination of our will to God’s will——a readiness for any self-denial and effort on our part necessary to the answer, through whatever trying ordeal that answer may come. But the process is essential to the result.
Once answered, the prayer brings the additional responsibility of walking in its light. We find ourselves straggling within the toils of some disaster. We ask the Lord, “How is this?” He gradually unfolds the meaning as indicating some transition in His plan for our life. Having carried us safely through, and having set us surely in the line of the new departure, He expects us to take up the full measure of its obligation. When, with Saul of Tarsus, we are dazed by the new experience and cry out, Lord, what wilt thou have us to do? we are, with him, to accept the labor and sacrifice implied thereby. David puts it thus: “I will pay Thee my vows which my lips have uttered and my mouth hath spoken when I was in trouble.” Hannah, with her prayer answered in the gift of a son, must fulfil her vow in devoting him to the service of the Lord. For a long time God’s people were praying Him to open the way among the nations for the entrance of the Gospel of his Son. He answered by setting open the door to every land and to every island of the sea. It is our duty to enter and occupy. If we do not, we are grossly disobedient to the heavenly vision; we are found guilty of deserting in the battle of the great day of the Lord Almighty. The Christian world now rests under this obligation.
We wrestled with God in prayer for the deliverance of our brethren in bonds. We cried, Oh Lord, how long! how long! The answer came by terrible things in righteousness. We had scarcely expected to see it in our day. Our thought had stopped with the great burden of emancipation. Our vision scarcely took in the mountain of obligation looming in the horizon of our answered prayer. We thought that if we could only see our country delivered from its crime and shame of oppression, the millennium would be near at hand. We had not yet taken upon our hearts the burden of lifting up the emancipated race. We had not yet received our divine commission to lead this people through their forty years of training into the citizenship of the republic and of the kingdom of God. But this was all implied in the answering of our prayer. We asked for this child of liberty, and now it is but the instinct of nature and the demand of reason that we meet the obligation of its nurture. We prayed that the slaves might be set free, and this implies that we make good the conditions of freedom. In the words of the martyr-President, they are “the wards of the nation.” So also are they the children of the Church, given in answer to prayer, to be nourished into Christian character for service in this their native land and in the country of their ancestral home.
J. E. Roy.