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struck by the peculiar words which he used. "Go ye," "preach the Gospel," "make disciples," witness"; there is another word, properly translated "teach," but that evidently refers to an aftertraining of those who have been first evangelized and made disciples. No unbiased reader can examine the body of instructions, given to the early Church by the Lord Himself, without observing that, first of all, He meant that there should be a simple heralding of good tidings, accompanied by personal witness to their truth and power, and a consequent making of disciples; and, then, that these converts should be gathered into churches, baptized, and further trained in fuller knowledge of divine truth and preparation for service.

To confound preaching and teaching, evangelization and indoctrination, is a mistake that is fundamental and initial. The didactic process is secondary and subordinate. Men are asleepdead in sin they must be aroused, awakened, quickened. When a house is on fire, a ship is on a rock, a pestilence is raging, or an avalanche is falling, one does not wait to give minute instructions, but peals out the trumpet note, "Escape for thy life!" So our Lord saw this world, lying in sin, and its millions going down to the death of the grave and the second death of hell with fearful rapidity; and He urged a correspondingly rapid proclamation of the Gospel. He urged on His heralds-He bade them not wait for others to

come to them, but "go" to every creature-sweep round the globe and trumpet forth the warning and the invitation until "every creature shall

have heard.

Nor are we anywhere taught to wait for results. These we cannot command or control. Noah, the ancient preacher of righteousness, preached for a century-preached an illustrated sermon, in which the Ark was his grand object lesson, and every hammer's blow punctuated and emphasized his appeal; yet he made not one convert, and was compelled to see the whole world of the ungodly sink, lost in the angry flood of wrath. Isaiah, the Messianic minstrel, sung in twentyseven chapters the epic and lyric of the suffering Saviour; yet he cried, "Lord, who hath believed our report, and to whom hath the arm of the Lord been revealed!" And the Son of God Himself, who spake as never man spake, and wrought as never man wrought, found His words of grace used as traps and snares for His feet, and His works of love attributed to the agency of the devil. The disciple is not above his Master nor the servant above his Lord; and there has not been one preacher of Christ in all the ages whose witness has not been met by more rejectors than believers. We are both to look for and pray for results, but we are not to gauge our fidelity or our success, or our Master's approval by the number of converts; nor is the herald to wait in any one field until

conversion has done its work, before he goes to the regions beyond. The danger is common to all; Death and Hell are mounted on their awful steeds, and are hotly pursuing the whole host of mankind: if those whom we warn will not hear and heed, perhaps others will; and, in any case, we owe to all the same privilege and opportunity of hearing and heeding. With all possible haste should the Church push her heralds on to the very limits of the globe. Without an hour's delay, for any cause, on any pretext, save only to receive power from above, should we who believe urge on this holy crusade for God until every living soul has heard of Christ. This Gospel of the Kingdom must first be preached among all nations as a witness-and "then shall the end come." Whether these words refer to the end of the Jewish age, in the destruction of Jerusalem, or to the end of the Gospel age, in the second advent of the Son of Man, or to both, there is here indicated a vital relation which the general proclamation of the Gospel bears to the consummation of God's plan. He is working toward an end, and that end is conditioned upon this world-wide evangelism. God told Lot that He could not do anything in judgment upon Sodom until he should come to Zoar. The announcement of the Gospel, among all nations and to every creature, is the Zoar to which the Church of God must come, before those grand events move to their consummation

which at once bring judgment to sinners and salvation to saints.

Notwithstanding the fact that "preaching the Gospel as a witness" is our Lord's own chosen definition of the work to be done, this phrase has met vigorous and violent opposition, and been pelted with the blows of ridicule as the sum of all absurdities. And yet, from first to last, this is His form of statement, alike before His death and on the eve of His ascension.*

Is "witnessing," then, so superficial, artificial a process, that we are to picture to ourselves some flying courier, galloping on horseback through village after village, announcing the good news, and then hastening away elsewhere? To bear testimony unto all nations is no such short, hasty, inadequate proclamation of the Gospel message. However important the mere work of the herald, other forms of testimony are needful to confirm, corroborate, establish this witness. The conversion of souls, which witnesses that this Gospel is the power of God unto salvation; the out-gathering of converts from the world and their in-gathering into the Church, which witnesses both against the world, by separation, and unto God, by consecration; the erection of the Christian home, which witnesses to what Christ can do, not for man only, but for woman and children, making the wife man's equal companion, instead of his slave and

* Matt. xxiv. 14; Acts i. 8.

victim, and the mother the radiant centre of a happy household; the setting up of Christian school, college, printing press and medical mission -these trees of life whose fruit is food and whose leaves are healing; the whole array of Christian institutions which are the peculiar product of the faith which works by love-all these belong to that "witness" for Christ which helps one to judge whether indeed "He is able to save to the uttermost all who come unto God by Him." This is the testimony which vindicates His claim to universal homage and world-wide dominion. We believe the work of witnessing in all the world will not be complete until, in every nation, the contrast between the teaching and practice of the true faith and of all false faiths shall thus be made to appear, somewhat as the Kho-Thah-Byu Memorial Hall in Burmah confronts the Schway Mote Tau Pagoda on an opposing hill, a witness to Christ that boldly faces and challenges that forsaken fane of idolatry, as though to assert and maintain the Supreme right of Jesus to worship and service.

We are not jealous for any human theory, nor are we warring about words. But something is wrong. Our Lord, more than eighteen and a half centuries ago, urged an immediate and world-wide proclamation of the Gospel to every creature; and yet, in this closing decade of this nineteenth century, at least one-half of the population of this globe remain as entirely strangers even to the fact