Apocalypse ends with a special injunction, forbidding any addition or subtraction; but here the curtain simply falls on Paul, teaching and preaching, without even bringing to a close the scene in which he last appears. And the reason is because

this book is the Book of a Witnessing Church, and that book never will be closed until that witness is also concluded; until the Gospel is borne to the uttermost parts of the earth and the last witness has been uttered, and believed or rejected.

Any one of us, any believer to the end of the age, may write his own name where Paul's now stands and fill out the record with his own witness for Christ. Or, if he be too humble in his own esteem to venture on a record, there is Another who, while he is living and working for his Master, is writing a new chapter to record how he also passed the years teaching and testifying of Christ and of the grace of God.

When the Bishop of Ripon read that narrative of John Williams' labors in the South Seas, he laid it down, exclaiming, "There is the Twenty-ninth chapter in the Acts of the Apostles!" Every believer has only to take his place among God's witnesses, and in his generation to testify to all men the Gospel of His grace, to be admitted to a place in the holy company of the apostles, and have his name and life history recorded in that unwritten sequel of the Acts, which is to be read before an assembled universe in the Day when the Books are opened!

II.

THE DIVINE PLAN OF MISSIONS.

HEN, on the site of Byzantium, Constantine, in the year 328 A.D., was himself, in person, marking out the boundary line for the proposed city of Constantinople; and when his attention was called to the vast extent of the area he was enclosing, and the improbability that the City of the Cæsars would ever occupy it, he calmly answered: "I am following Him who is leading me."

But,

The Church has attempted a gigantic task, in extending and enlarging the place of her tent and stretching her canopy over a world-wide area. The work is so stupendous that it has inclined some to remonstrate, and even to ridicule. be it ever remembered, that in so doing we are "following Him who is leading" us. It is He who has bidden us "Lengthen our cords and strengthen our stakes." No task can be too colossal in magnitude if He plans it and entrusts to us the execution of what is really His plan. And here is the threefold dependence of His servants: the plan, the promise, and the providence of God.

The idea, or thought of God in missions, as we have already seen, is this: a Gospel message, received by faith in the heart, and proclaimed, by the mouth of every believer, in the ear of every other human being.

The Plan of God is akin to His Thought; but though closely related to it, not identical with it. The English word "plan"—from the latin planus, flat-originally refers to a representation of any object or conception drawn upon a flat surface, like the map of a country, or the plan of a building. We can all readily distinguish, in our own minds, between the conception of a cathedral, as it lay in the brain of Brunelleschi, and the draught of Santa Maria's Cupola, as put upon paper. Now God has an idea of missions: He projects His thought upon the pages of His Word, and still more clearly defines it by the pencil of History. His idea and ideal become real in the practical plane of action; and that is His Plan.

The importance of studying and understanding His plan cannot be overestimated. The late Prince Albert said no wiser word to the younger men of his generation than this: "Find out the plan of God in your day; and then beware that you do not cross it, but fall into your own place in that plan." Sydney Smith expressed the same thought in his quaint way, when he compared men to pegs, and their spheres of service to the holes into which the pegs must be fitted.

Nothing perhaps is more fundamental to a truly serviceable life than to know what God's plan is, and knowing it, come into right relations to it. When His mind guides, no mistake is possible; no failure is conceivable, when His will controls. Faber writes truly:

"He always wins who sides with God,

To Him no chance is lost."

To God's chariots two celestial chargers are yoked: Omniscience and Omnipotence; the rim of those chariot wheels is so high that it is dreadful, and full of eyes before and behind. To set oneself against God's purpose is to be trampled in pieces under the feet of those steeds, and ground to powder beneath those wheels; but it is no less certain that, to work for and with God is to be borne along irresistibly toward the goal of consummate victory and final glory!

There are two ways of finding out God's plan, and they are to be pursued along parallel lines. One is to study His Word, and the other, to study His work; on the one hand to search the Scriptures, and on the other, to watch that march of God in history which is His preceptive teaching wrought into the form of acts and facts. We say these two methods should be pursued side by side, for they mutually complement and correct each other, or, rather, our understanding of both.

In addition to these, we need also, and above

all, a receptive mind. There must be a clear-seeing eye, otherwise in vain is the plainest handwriting of God on the pages of the Word or on the walls of the ages. The "natural man " does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, neither can he know them, for they are spiritually discerned; the "carnal mind is enmity against God, not subject to His law, neither indeed can be": so far therefore as we search the Scripture with the natural mind only, we shall not see His plan; and, so far as we approach it with the carnal mind only, we shall not obey, even if we perceive, His will.

Scripture and history are the two books of God on missions, and each throws light upon the pages of the other; but one may read both and still be as blind to their real meaning as is the Jew, who reads the prophecy of Messiah without seeing in it the forecast of history, and reads the history of Messiah without finding in it the fulfilment of the prophecy !

To come to the study of God's plan of missions with the merely natural eye as the organ of vision, or the merely carnal mind as the organ of knowledge, is to see double, if at all. Either the plan of missions, as seen in the Word, will be modified and distorted by our defective vision, or it will seem to be in conflict with that same plan, as unfolded and developed in history. We shall either start with wrong conceptions and so misinterpret history; or we shall start with correct ideas and