The Vision of the Field
Our Lord’s farewell words taught that great second lesson, that the field of witness is as wide as the world.
“Unto the uttermost parts of the earth” must disciples go. Dispersion is the next lesson to be learned, and learned anew in every age. Pentecost prepared for the scattering of those whom the Spirit endued, as they went back to the four quarters of the inhabited world with the life-giving word.
When the disciples, thus endued with power, returned to their separate abodes, this dispersion was itself a missionary campaign. The annual Passover at the national capital was a mighty magnet whose attractive force was felt wherever the scattered remnants of the Hebrew race were found. Great was the concourse, and from many lands. The procession of pilgrims was like the flood, swept through dry riverbeds by the latter rain, and for miles around the sacred city houses and hamlets were crowded, and in every valley and grove tents thronged like a camp. When those who thus came up to keep the feasts of Passover and Pentecost went back with the enduement of power, God was in unforeseen ways multiplying the channels for far-reaching and effective witness. What human wisdom could have planned a scheme whereby the experience of one day in Jerusalem should thus touch so quickly the very ends of the earth!
The persecution that arose about Stephen was another event, vocal with a new command for dispersion. Disciples were prone to congregate and concentrate at Jerusalem; it compelled them to separate and scatter. It was natural for the Jewish
Christian Church to gravitate toward the old centre of the hierarchy and of worship, where the tribes had been wont to gather. But the centripetal attraction has always been the fatal foe of missions. Love is a centrifugal force, and He who taught us the supreme lesson of love, said, ‘’Go ye into all the world; as My Father hath sent Me, even so send I you.” When this message was in danger of being unheeded, and the old tendency to selfish centralization and religious seclusion was asserting itself, God, by His providence, repeated with stern emphasis the lesson that the Church was to disperse far and wide. It was done as by a peal of thunder and the shock of earthquake. Persecution with explosive violence drove disciples from the Holy City to the very bounds of Palestine. The Church was shattered that it might be scattered, and fragments were found at Antioch and throughout Syria, at Cyprus, and throughout Phoenicia. And so persecution became the parent of early Christian missions. Strange parentage! ‘’Out of the eater came forth meat!” The devouring lion furnishes supplies to the hungry.
Thus, for all time, God’s voice was heard, and the lesson is left on record that, in all this age of evangelism, the policy of His people is to be diffusion and dispersion. No favoured, favourite capital is to become our chapel-of-ease, our earthly rest, even though it could be an earthly Heaven, while hell is found raging in the regions beyond. Even the joys of Christian fellowship may become too absorbing. Selfishness in its most refined forms must yield to the unselfishness which resigns such companionship for ourselves that it may become possible to introduce the most depraved, degraded and destitute to the fellowship of saints and of God. Any influence, any combination of causes, implies a curse to the believer whenever it makes the Church a cradle to rock God’s children to sleep with the soft lullaby of “Home, Sweet Home!”
Other visions and voices fastened the impression of this second lesson that the witness of disciples is to find in the wide world, its field.
I. Peter’s trance on the housetop at Joppa was both a vision and a voice, teaching most impressively this truth. A parable was enacted, the Divine hand being back of the shifting scenery. The sheet, let down from heaven by its four corners, in which were found all manner of creatures, wild and tame, clean and unclean, was a speaking sym.bol of the Church, not of man’s device but of God’s design, let down from heaven and to be caught up again into heaven; its four corners hinting its universal character, reaching ultimately to the four corners of the earth; within whose amiple folds are to be brought all classes and conditions of men, from all quarters and climes, nations and grades of society, and representing all varieties of intellectual and moral degradation and development.
No pictorial lesson ever before or since has so taught the value and dignity of man as man! The vision was itself sufficiently vocal, yet it must have a voice to interpret it, and that voice three times spoke the same words:
*’ WHAT GOD HATH CLEANSED,
THAT CALL NOT THOU COMMON!”
Blow after blow of God’s heavy hammer, to break into pieces and beat into powder, the adamantine walls of Jewish exclusiveness, and the brazen gates of religious bigotry!
Peter was a representative Jew, and, unlike Paul, seems never as yet to have strayed beyond the bounds of the Holy Land. He was an ecclesiastical aristocrat. To all such as he, the law of separation obscures the law of love. This voice and vision were meant for more than himself. They were the lasting rebuke of that spirit of Caste which upholds invidious distinctions, and upbuilds impassable barriers between man and man.
Of caste, it is not too much to say that it has been the one giant foe of world-wide missions. Very early in Church history God’s own hand wrote upon the wall, in letters of fire, such as struck awe to the hearts of the Babylonian revellers —
‘* What God hath cleansed, that call not thou common.”
The whole race will never be reached with the gospel, until we learn what is meant by ‘’all the world,” and ‘’every creature.” In God’s eyes, and therefore in our eyes, no line is to be drawn which limits love or labour for human souls; no discrimination allowed, save in favour of the least and lowest, most destitute and degraded. We are to call or consider no man common or unclean; in love’s impartial ministry, no one is to be evaded or avoided; and so far are we to be from such narrowness and selfishness that those are to have the first claim upon our sympathy and succour, who are most in need and most without help.
Peter’s vision marked a new stage, a new epoch in Church history. Years have sped by since the Lord went up and the Spirit came down. Yet, despite the great commission and the great effusion; notwithstanding the wide diffusion of the witnesses, by their return to distant homes, and the wide dispersion of persecuted disciples, two barriers yet remain to hinder the world-wide work: the tendency to centralization and the principle of exclusion. The Jew had not yet learned that other places were lawful for worship and solemn assembly beside the Temple of Jerusalem, and that wherever worshippers meet in the Spirit, God is to be found.
The old exclusive policy and spirit survived. As Thales, wisest and best of Greeks, looked on all outside of Greece as “barbarians,” so, to the Jew all beyond the circle of the covenant were aliens to be shunned, if not foes to be hated. That phrase, ‘’The Jews have no dealings with the Samaritans,” is the key to a chamber of curious and shameful customs and prejudices. The road between Jerusalem and Galilee lay through Samaria, and the Jew must needs go that way or cross the Jordan; but he held his very garments free from the defiling touch of the inhabitants whom he despised as a hybrid, bastard progeny of heathenism and Judaism. By proximity a neighbour, the Samaritan was by hostility a foe, and the Jew would hesitate to point the lost traveller to the road or the thirsty pilgrim to a spring, if he belonged to that unclean race!
What wonder if such barriers had to be broken down before the work of missions could be done or the spirit of missions could have sway! The walls that shut Jewish disciples in, shut strangers and foreigners out. Obstinate holding on to Jerusalem meant equally stubborn casting off of all outsiders. The lines of caste were in effect fatal hindrances to all world evangelization, barriers scarcely less rigid and frigid than those which part the millions of India.
We have seen how the Providence and Spirit of God battered down these walls as with shot and shell by the explosive force of persecution, and how Philip’s work in Samaria and his word to the Ethiopian eunuch crossed caste lines; and now, not as by earthquake, storm or flame, but in the still small voice of solemn rebuke and repeated remonstrance, God speaks to Peter, that he may echo it to the whole Church, that God’s cleansing leaves no man common or unclean. Then followed at Caesar’s palace and before a Roman audience, a display of grace that illustrated and enforced the lesson on the housetop, and forbade the Jew ever to dispute the right, even of the hated conqueror of his nation, to a full part in the great salvation.
That lesson on the housetop was thrice taught
17G THE NEW ACTS OE THE APOSTLES. ’
perhaps because it concerned the work of the Triune God. The Father’s electing grace, the Son’s atoning blood, the Spirit’s renewing power, — all cleanse believers equally and guarantee their equality of right. But one thing is sure: so long as any man is to us common or unclean, we have not caught the divine passion of universal missions. Conversion implies contact, and contact, approach. To Peter, because he was appointed to open the kingdom to all believers, as the representative Apostle, the Divine Preacher gave this picture-lesson with its interpreting voice. The vision and the voice are equally for us. They teach that before Him who is no respecter of persons, all men are on the same moral level; that as to condemnation there is “no difference,”” for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God;” that as to gracious invitation there is “no difference,” for the same Lord over all is rich unto all that call upon Him; and as to actual salvation and sanctification there is “no difference,” for He purifies the hearts of all alike by faith. The first formal proclamation of this fact of the universality of gospel grace was to be made in the palace of Roman aliens, before a gentile centurion and his company, and Peter was to announce it. Hence the thrice-repeated lesson which compelled the impetuous and wilful Jew to learn human equality before God.
When these new chapters in the Acts of the Apostles were to be written, in our age of missions, the old lesson was retaught, and if possible, with heavier accentuation of its central truth. In heathen lands caste lines and limits are frigidly rigid like ice barriers. The Brahmanic system has been aptly characterized as “a cellular structure of society in which the cells never interpenetrate.” The different classes, which are by a hoary superstition connected with different parts of the body of Brahm, are like strata of rock, petrified into immobility and immutability. Nothing short of an earthquake convulsion, upheaving the whole social order, could break up this strong fatality of social status. No personal worth or intellectual attainment or heroic achievement, no service to the nation or to its religion, can lift a Hindu above the level of caste in which he was born, though a trifling violation of petty rules may sink him to a lower level as an out-caste. Customs so absurdly unreasonable and inflexible become barriers to mutual fellowship, even between converts at the table of the Lord, and in work for souls.
Thus it is not too much to say that the most formidable obstacle to oriental missions is caste. The Tabu system found prevailing in the islands of the sea was essentially identical with it, forbidding wives to share a meal with their husbands, and making it a capital crime for an inferior to cast his shadow upon his chief by inadvertently passing between him and the sun!
Caste lines are not confined to heathen, pagan and moslem territory. In countries, called Christian, we find arbitrary distinctions scarcely less formidable as hindrances to practical fellowship and common service. In some Protestant communities there exists an aristocratic social structure, where partition walls still effectually divide patrician and plebeian classes, nobility and commonalty. True, it is possible for a man to rise higher: the common labourer sometimes becomes the master-workman, the merchant prince, the member of Parliament or of the ruling class. But ascent is not easy, and we all need Peter’s lesson reiterated: What God hath cleansed, that call not thou common. Republics as well as monarchies, democracy as well as aristocracy, prove human nature still to be depraved, for in the best social state we find caste walls existing. What is more despotic than the aristocracy of wealth, that hangs one’s social rank on the chance of a business venture; or the aristocracy of fashion, that makes Brummels princes, and character something worn on the back, to be bought at a tailor’s shop; or even the aristocracy of culture, which weighs manhood in the scales of refinement and confounds morals with manners?
God saw how much there was needed a new lesson even in this missionary century, a lesson to be taught repeatedly and emphatically, that the only real, ultimate standard of value is that which is within reach of all, namely, vioral wortJi; and that as to accidents of birth or blood, of poverty, culture and social position, the Scotch poet was a moral philosopher when he sang,
“A man’s a man for a’ that!”
That social system which most allows men to breathe and move freely, affording inspiration to hope and scope for growth, is the most perfect. The lamented President Garfield, himself an example of one who had risen far above his native level, used to say that the ideal state is one where we find, not * * as in the land, fixed and immovable layers of soil or rock, but as in the sea, conditions so elastic and flexible, that the drop which to-day touches the sand at the bottom may to-morrow gleam upon the wave’s crest.” If in any man there be the force that bears him onward and upward, love forbids us to hold him hopelessly down. The Church should present an ideal state, where all have equal rights, and equal claims upon all that can uplift, emancipate, educate body, mind, soul; where aspiration has full play, and advancement finds favouring conditions.
When King James sent the poor poet, Ben Jonson, a present of a crown piece, Jonson sent back word by the bearer, ‘’The king sends me five shillings because I live in an alley. Go tell him that his soul lives in an alley!” Modern missions have written in letters of light this noble lesson, that many a man who is clothed in purple and fine linen, lives in an alley; and many a beggar who lies at the gate, asking alms of charity, is on his way to the King’s palace. See how the Divine Teacher has taught the inherent dignity and royalty of character, in choosing for leaders of the Church universal, Carey from the cobbler’s bench, Williams from the ironmonger’s forge, Marsden from the blacksmith’s anvil, Livingstone from the cotton mill, Hunt from the farmer’s plough, Johnson from the sugar refinery!
Let us beware how we foster the spirit of caste. Charles Darwin pronounced the Patagonians the missing link between man and the monkey, and thought that not even the lever of Christian missions could uplift them; the French papist who ruled on the Isle of Bourbon told the pioneer missionaries to Madagascar that to convert the Malagasy was as hopeless as to convert oxen, sheep, or asses. But even so enlightened a man as a Canon of Westminster ranked the aboriginies of Australia so low that it was not worth while to expend labour upon them. In appeals for Africa, how often have we been met by the objection that it is a waste of men and money to preach to the fetish worshippers, because they have no capacity to understand or receive spiritual truth, and the image of God, if it ever existed in them, is not only defaced but effaced!
The whole history of modern missions is a vision and a voice in favour of man as man. God has shown by the proof of facts, by that most conclusive argument — experiment — that no human being is too high to need the gospel, or too low to be reached by it. The most signal triumphs and glorious trophies of the good tidings have been among the very classes whom our scepticism would account beneath the reach even of saving grace. The most fertile fields for the seed of the kingdom have been those previously the most barren of good, or desperately fruitful in evil. Man would have turned to the higher classes, appealing to intelligence and capacity. But while they have turned from Christ with contempt, behold the debased demon worshipper in whom all ideas of true worship seem obliterated; or the degraded cannibal, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful; or the brutal savage, whose religion was a mixture of lust and lies, robbery and cruelty, bloody wars and lawless violence, who cared neither for the virtue of womanhood, nor the innocence of childhood, nor the helplessness of old age — behold such brought to bow at Jesus’ feet, and then going forth to tell of Him to others! We can scarce believe our own eyes as we see the modern miracles of missions, of which no pen has ever told the half. Those who glutted their avarice by pillage, their revenge by slaughter, their appetite by feasts on human flesh, — these have been found believing in Jesus and heralding His power to save! Let God speak, ye who think even the worst of the race beneath your respect and unworthy of Christian effort! ‘’ God hath made of one blood all nations of men; “and by one blood hath He redeemed all peoples. Therefore, He says, “Go ye into all the world and make disciples of all nations.”
Yes, the century is vocal with divine appeals for man as man. Enthusiasm for humanity, that divine passion for souls, must sweep away the hollow, shallow distinctions which part men asunder. In every human soul we must see the potential saint, outranking angels in the closeness of bond with Christ. Without such enthusiasm for humanity, missions must languish.
Peter’s vision on the housetop was the forecast; the modern Church is the prophecy fulfilling. In the sheet let down from heaven every class of mankind is already embraced. Wild beasts have been tamed and turned into obedient bullocks, ready for plough or altar; unclean birds of prey are changed to gentle doves, celestial songsters, birds of paradise; crawling reptiles that crept along the earth are transformed into erect men who walk with God. What the Apostle saw in anticipation, we see in realization.
2. Paul, as well as Peter, was taught a divine lesson on the universal need of man. How different his experience at Athens from that of Peter at Cesarea, yet both essentially impress one great lesson.
That ^’ altar to the unknown God” in the very centre of Greek art and wisdom, beauty and philosophy, brands as a failure any civilization that knows not God, because it has no savouring or saving element — no salt of salvation. It reminds one of Heine’s comparing beautiful women without religion to flowers without perfume — cold, sober tulips in china vases, looking as though they were also of porcelain, and seeming to say that it is all-sufficient not to have a bad odour, and that a rational flower needs no fragrance. Athens stands in history as the tulip in the vase, coldly beautiful, lifelessly aesthetic — having no savour or flavour of high moral virtue or piety. And Paul’s comparative ill success at the Greek capital, and the apathetic hearing at Mars Hill, serve to remind us that stagnant indifference is as bad as violent opposition, and that blasphemers and barbarians go into the kingdom of God before scholarly sceptics and cultivated worldlings. As yet not many wise, mighty, noble, are called. God chooses the foolish, weak, despised nothings to bring to naught the somethings. And yet as the Countess of Huntingdon said, let us thank God it is not true that not any, though not many of the wise and mighty are called. There was one Areopagite, Dionysius, who clave to the Apostle, so that the address on Mars Hill won one convert even from the philosophers. The loftiest as well as lowliest need the gospel, and we are to proclaim it at Corinth and Athens as well as at Nazareth and Gadara.
That sermon to the Areopagite wise men should be studied, for it addresses universal and conscious instincts of man’s religious nature. It was a unique address, wholly unlike any other Paul ever delivered. In it he spoke to those who knew not the true God nor the sacred writings of His prophets, nor the words and works of Jesus, His Son. Hence he had to go further back and deeper down than when he spoke to Felix or Agrippa, to Jews at Jerusalem or Greeks at Antioch. He appealed to seven universal instincts:
1. The Filial: “For we also are His offspring.”
2. The Fraternal: ^’ He hath made of one blood,” &c.
3. The Theistic: “Your altar to the unknown God.”
4. The Judicial: “A day in the which He will judge the world.”
5. The Religious: ^’In all things ye are very religious.”
6. The instinct of Worship: ‘’Ye ignorantly worship.”
7. The instinct of Prayer: “Should feel after Him,”&c.
In modern days, sagacious missionaries have learned from Paul at Athens, that in every clime they may find classes of men who know not God, but to whose instinctive religious nature they may appeal.
The universal, belief in God, which, however obscured, seemed never obliterated, furnishes a basis for preaching the gospel to all men. Fred. Stanley Arnot found everywhere in Africa two existing notions: First, of a supreme power over all; and secondly, of a future life beyond death. To these he could always safely appeal. And even in Mohammedan lands where little has yet been done, encouragements are not wanting; for the followers of the Prophet are not idolaters, and claim to be monotheists, and to accept even the Old Testament. Among them we have the religious instincts comparatively pure.
3. Paul’s night vision at Troas was literally vocal, for the man of Macedonia prayed him, saying-, ‘’Come over into Macedonia, and help us;” and from that vision and that voice he assuredly gathered that the Lord was calling him to a new field in the regions beyond. And so the gospel first entered Europe.
That vocal vision was for the whole Church, and it means that we are never to rest, whatever has been done, while more yet remains undone. However wide the sweep of our mission tours, if beyond this circle of effort there is a region where the gospel has not reached, this fact constitutes a trumpet peal of God. And especially if the peal be also a personal appeal; if, as in so many cases, human need finds a voice wherewith to call, as Mtesa did from Uganda, as Chulalangkorn did from Siam, as Pomare did from Tahiti, as Ranavolona II. did from Madagascar, as McAll did from France, — how prompt should be the response from the Church of Christ! When out of the region of darkness and death-shade, heathen and pagan peoples clamour for Christian teachers; when fields are ready for the sower and there is no one to scatter the seed, or ready for the reaper and there is no one to put in the sickle; when doors open fast and wide, and no labourers enter some of them, and in other cases, too few, why do we not assuredly gather that God is calling us to go and carry the cross with us? Why are we so slow to push the schemes of holy work into new territory, and send or bear the bread of life to starving souls? How can God set before us a wider and more effectual door than when the heathen themselves are ready to hear the gospel, and make appeal to us to come to them?
This is the paradox of missions. Where are our sandals of alacrity that we speed not as on wings of love to fly to the help of the perishing! Had we the true passion for souls, Satan would no longer be the hinderer, though he piled up obstacles in our way. We should overleap all self-denials in our zeal to relieve soul-wants. It is one of the irreconcilable contradictions of history that the instinctive human sympathies have more readily responded to the appeal of flood or famine, pestilence or plague, than the Christian heart to the awful need of those who perish of hunger for living bread, or who are swept away by the flood of sin and smitten with the leprosy of self-consuming lusts! Temporal wants and woes are real to our sluggish sense, but we are dead to the spiritual poverty and misery of humanity.
That night vision at Troas has been a thousand times repeated within the last century. That man of Macedonia may be seen whichever way we look, and the voice calls to us from every quarter of the horizon. Who that watches modern missions does not feel that what Paul saw and heard at Troas has become the vision for all believers, and the voice from all lands? Let the eye sweep round the whole world, and on the coasts of Corea and Japan, from the depths of Inland China, from the hills of Burma and the rivers of Siam, from India’s coral strand and Persia’s plains, from the borders of the Red Sea and the valley of the Nile, the banks of the Congo and the vast stretch of the Soudan, from papal countries and pagan communities, there comes one loud voice: “Come over into our Macedonia and help us.” Were our eyes not dull of vision, and our ears, of hearing, through the flare and glare and blare of this world, we should see and hear this ‘’man of Macedonia,” standing at every point of the horizon, stretching forth hands in appeal, and calling for help.
King Mtesa, whose request for teachers found such voice through Stanley’s letters that it pealed across thousands of miles of land and sea and was heard in Britain and America, was only a representative of the race. The needs of Siam have been referred to; there, cities as large as Birmingham and Edinburgh, Leeds and Leicester, are asking vainly for one evangelist to come to their hundreds of thousands, and tell how God loved the world. Burma and the Karens have never had all the helpers which the field demanded. Japan, the modern marvel, suddenly threw open her long-locked sea gates forty years ago; and China, India, Central America, Papal Europe, became likewise open fields for missions — all within a twelvemonth! And yet the devil has shown more zeal to take possession than the children of God. Read the story of the South Seas, and see how the consecrated energy of John Hunt and John Williams, of Geddie and Marsden and Selwyn and Patteson and Paton proved unequal to the meeting of the demands for Bibles and men. From that day to this the same experience has been repeated elsewhere. For centuries, where Rome ruled, the open Bible was flung into the flames and the Protestant missionary dared prison cell, if not martyr’s stake. Now France has over a hundred and thirty McAll mission salles, and might have a thousand but for want of money and men; and the land of the Inquisition is growing harvests for God in the very fields which Torquemadaand Valdez, Deza and Ximenes unconsciously fertilized with the ashes of thirty thousand saints. Think of Bible carts in Madrid unable to supply books sufficient for those who would buy; and a few elect messengers of the cross struggling to meet the wants of hundreds who are deserting the crucifix! When Ethiopia thus stretches forth hands unto God, when China’s millions call for missions, and Corea’s valleys begin to be vocal with praise; when the capital of the papacy has thirty Protestant chapels within its walls; when from the kingdom of the sunrise to the land of the sunset, there goes up one call for Bibles, schools and churches, teachers and preachers, what is it but the call from Macedonia repeated like a thunder-peal all around the circle of the earth I
There are hindrances, no doubt, in the way of missions, but they are most serious withm the Church. We are not so ready to send messengers and Bibles as the unevangelized often are to receive. If the response of the Church were as quick as the appeal from the world is loud, within our generation every hill and valley of the earth might be sending up to God the incense of prayer and praise.
The slowness of our forward march is saddening, but no words can fitly characterize the sin and the crime of going backward. The call for *’ retrejtchmenf is like the tolling of a death-knell from the belfry of our missionary boards. Think of it! For lack of men and means, we cannot go a step ahead even to enter new doors, but must go back and leave fields already occupied! We cannot advance but must retreat — abandoning vantage-ground already gained, and, instead of taking new strongholds, evacuating those strategic positions now held! Think of closing preaching stations, shutting up schools, turning adrift native evangelists, locking up Christian presses with silence, calling in our forces and beating a retreat! It seems incredible; but every time the cry goes forth, retrench! it means all this and a great deal more!
When Judson was in the very crisis of his work in Burma, the appropriation for the mission was ten thousand rupees less than the current expenses required. Instead of any advance, he could not even hold his already-gained positions. With a disappointment that bordered on despair, he solemnly recorded as his ‘’growing conviction” that ‘’the Baptist churches in America are behind the age in missionary spirit. They now and then make a spasmodic effort to throw off a nightmare debt of some years’ accumulation, and then sink back into unconscious repose. Then come paralyzing orders to retrench; new enterprises are checked in their very conception, and applicants for missionary employ are advised to wait, and soon became merged in the ministry at home.” And so letters, which ought to have been like a soft and cooHng breeze to a heated brow, came upon him like a sudden tornado, sweeping away the plans of missionary evangelism. He said in his agony, “I thought they loved me; and they would scarce have known it if I had died! I thought they were praying for us; and they have never once thought of us!” And so it seemed to the missionary in his unsupported work.
4. God has in every nation, elect saints; because the gospel message is for man as man, converts are gathered out of most unlikely fields. How significant, therefore, were that vision and voice at Corinth, when the Lord spake to Paul; ‘’Be not afraid but speak, and hold not thy peace; for I am with thee, and no man shall set on thee to hurt thee; for I have much people in this city.”
That vision and voice were for the whole Church and for all time. Often has God shown that even where human hate builds huge walls against the truth, and human wrath builds hot fires for its witnesses. He has much people; and that the faith that fears not, can face the foes of God and of His gospel with firmness and unfaltering fixedness of heart, still witnessing to the cross. While martyrs have burned, they have been snatching brands from worse burning to become branches of the true vine; and by their death have brought life to their very murderers, as Stephen’s stoning was, perhaps, the secret of Saul’s conversion.
This lesson has been taught us so repeatedly in the New Acts of the Apostles that it must be reserved for special treatment when we come to consider the New Signs and Wonders. Suffice it now to repeat that in our age of missions, God has thus in many ways taught us by voices and visions this second great lesson: that the field for a witnessing Church is the whole world and embraces every creature. Man’s universal need gives forth its conscious echo in response to the good tidings. The worst men show capacity to repent, believe in Christ and receive the Spirit. Religious instincts, though buried, are not dead, and when exhumed, revive. Even in ruins, souls have a dignity and majesty which forbid caste lines to exclude even the lowest classes from the hope of saints and the love of the brotherhood. In every nation God has accepted souls.