sembled, the chairman said: "Gentlemen of the Committee-When we adjourned this morning you were equally divided as to the expediency of recommending to Congress to make this appropriation, and it fell to me to give the casting vote. I am now ready to give my emphatic decision in favor of the appropriation, for I have both sent and received messages across the wires!"

The wires are up between this world and the unseen; and he who enters into his closet, and prays to the Father who is in secret, sends to the Throne of God the message of believing prayer, and gets back the answering message of a faithful God! He can give his emphatic voice and vote for the reality of things unseen, for he has come into sympathetic, personal touch with God Himself.

The oratory of the soul is also its observatory -the place of observation and revelation; and, if there were more constant and close fellowship with God, there would be more knowledge of God and more capacity for witness. Answered prayer is the open path that leads to knowledge of a prayerhearing God. Obedience is both the organ of spiritual perception and the school of spiritual education; for, "if any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine." * "To love God and keep His words, is to have the manifestation of God as it is impossible to the world." It is

* John vii. 17. + John xiv. 23.

possible to walk with God and be in constant contact with Him. Our doubts, instead of being our glory, are our shame-they come from minding earthly things, from living on a low level, and walking according to the course of this world.

This witnessing, being thus based upon experiment and experience, must therefore be confined to believers.

Two words we have already found to be conspicuous in the Great Commission,-"preach," and "witness." To preach is to proclaim as a herald; to witness is to testify from personal knowledge. The two widely and essentially differ, yet they complement each other. A herald is only the mouth of a message; a witness is the mouth of an experience. The public crier may announce or proclaim, for hire, tidings in which he feels no interest, and of the truth of which he has no knowledge. But a witness can speak only what he knows and testify only what he has seen, heard, felt. He is a herald, indeed, and a herald of good tidings, but he is more he is an example and proof of their verity and value. And therefore only a believer can be a witness.

The Gospel ministry is not a learned profession into which men may go at their own option or at the beck of avarice or ambition. It is a divine vocation, to which men are called by the voice of an Indwelling Spirit, who qualifies them to bear witness for God. No man, however gifted or

learned, is competent to preach, except so far as the truth he proclaims is the girdle which firmly and closely embraces his very vitals and holds in place all his other armor.* In countries where there is an Established Church, the danger always is that unconverted men will find their way into this sacred office, who, as Norman McLeod used to say, preach the truth-truth which is the world's life and which stirs the angels,-but too often as a telegraphic wire transmits the most momentous intelligence; and who grasp that truth, only as a sparrow grasps the wire by which the message is conveyed." Let this be engraven on our hearts that no human being is prepared to proclaim the good tidings, unless, and except so far as, those tidings have become to him or to her the means of salvation and sanctification. If a man could combine in himself the intelligence of a cherub and the love of a seraph, he could not, even then, be a witness, if grace had not transformed his own soul.

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Doubtless the angels would gladly have been the bearers of these good news. We are divinely told how they stand overawed before such a display of grace to sinners, and, as from the verge of some unfathomable abyss, gazed down into the depths of a love which they "desire to look into," but cannot explore. And, had they been entrusted with this message, on what joyful wings would

their legions have swept round the world trumpeting forth the blessed news! It would not have been nineteen centuries before even one-third of the race had been practically reached with the Gospel. But there was one fatal deficiency in angelic preaching:

"Never did angels taste above

Redeeming Grace and dying Love!”

And so God crowds them back, and thrusts forward, into the coveted place, saved sinners. The poorest, humblest, most unlettered believer, who has known penitence and faith, can do a work for God to which Gabriel himself would be unequal. Thus only can we explain the fact that, while an angel hovers about the chariot of the inquiring Ethiopian,* he does not himself speak to the eunuch, but bids Philip approach and guide him; and, even when the angel appears to Cornelius and announces to him God's acceptance of his alms and his prayers, he is restrained from further announcing to him the words of life and salvation, and significantly says: "Send men to Joppa and call for one Simon, whose surname is Peter; he shall tell thee words whereby thou and thy house shall be saved." t

How few believers appreciate this great truth, that while God is thus pressing upon them this solemn duty of preaching the Gospel, it is a privi† Acts x. 1–5; xi. 13, 14.

*Acts viii. 26.

lege so high and holy as to be coveted by angels! An archangel himself could not preach the Gospel as you or I can. We can say, I was a lost sinner, but now by grace I am saved-—that, no angel of any rank in the whole hierarchy can say; and, because God will have witnesses for His heralds, only believers are admitted to this privilege.

But there is quite another side to this matter. If believing disciples are essential to witnessing for God, witnessing for God is not less essential to believing souls. In the Sermon on the Mount, our Lord begins by a graphic portrait of a true disciple-and immediately passes from character to influence, which He presents in two simple familiar figures: "Ye are the salt of the earth," "Ye are the light of the world." Salt that has no savor neither savors nor saves; light that has no ray neither shines nor burns. In those very forms of figure our Lord is saying to us that a believer without a witness is worthless as savorless salt, or a rayless lamp. We must get beyond the conception of service to God as a mere help to growth, -it is a condition of life. Salt without saltness is no longer salt. A light without a ray is no longer a light. It is of the nature of the Christian life to witness, and, when there is no witness, is it too much to say, that, logically, there is no life?

When we look abroad and see between thirty and forty millions of professed believers, the major part of whom impart no godly savor to season