with Shem and his 3,000,000.  Consider what has been effected during the last fifty years.  There is no vaunting of scouts now.  No Indian gentlemen making themselves merry about the folly of thinking to convert the natives of India; magnifying the difficulties of caste; and setting our ministers into brown studies and speech-making in defense of missions.  No mission has yet been an entire failure.  We who see such small segments of the mighty cycles of God’s providence often imagine some to be failures which God does not.  Eden was such a failure, The Old World was a failure under Noah’s preaching.  Elijah thought it was all up with Israel.  Isaiah said:  “Who hath believed our report, and to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed?” And Jeremiah wished his head were waters, his eyes a fountain of tears, to weep over one of God’s plans for diffusing his knowledge among the heathen.  If we could see a larger arc of the great providential cycle, we might sometimes rejoice when we weep; but God giveth not account of any of his matters.  We must just trust to his wisdom.  Let us do our duty.  He will work out a glorious consummation.  Fifty years ago missions could not lift up their heads.  But missions now are admitted by all to be one of the great facts of the age, and the sneers about “Exeter Hall” are seen by every one to embody a risus sardonicus.  The present posture of affairs is, that benevolence is popular.  God is working out in the human heart his great idea, and all nations shall see his glory.

Let us think highly of the weapons we have received for the accomplishment of our work.  The weapons of our warfare are not carnal but spiritual, and mighty through God to the casting down of strongholds.  They are—­Faith in our Leader, and in the presence of his Holy Spirit; a full, free, unfettered Gospel; the doctrine of the cross of Christ,—­an old story, but containing the mightiest truths ever uttered—­mighty for pulling down the strongholds of sin, and giving liberty to the captives.  The story of Redemption, of which Paul said, “I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ,” is old, yet in its vigor, eternally young.

This work requires zeal for God and love for souls.  It needs prayer from the senders and the sent, and firm reliance on Him who alone is the Author of conversion.  Souls cannot be converted or manufactured to order.  Great deeds are wrought in unconsciousness, from constraining love to Christ; in humbly asking, Lord, what wilt thou have me to do? in the simple feeling, we have done that which was our duty to do.  They effect works, the greatness of which it will remain for posterity to discern.  The greatest works of God in the kingdom of grace, like his majestic movements in nature, are marked by stillness in the doing of them, and reveal themselves by their effects.  They come up like the sun, and show themselves by their own light.  The kingdom of God cometh not with observation.  Luther simply followed the leadings of the Holy Spirit