And a conviction of this is the greatest need of the Church to-day.  It is the key to the twentieth-century revival.  The world would be evangelized in this generation did each professing Christian win only one soul each year for Christ; and the great social and labor problems of the day would be speedily solved were the great Christian Church actively engaged in leading men and women to Jesus of Nazareth.  Mightier than the influence of great sermons and fine music and splendid ritual is the influence of a life consecrated to personal effort in seeking the lost.

That remarkable soul-winner, Dr. J.O.  Peck, now translated, said:  “So great is my conviction of the value of personal effort, as the result of a lifework of winning souls, that I can not emphasize the method too strongly.  If it were revealed to me from heaven by the archangel Gabriel that God had given me the certainty of ten years of life, and that as a condition of my eternal salvation I must win a thousand souls to Christ in that time; and if it were further conditioned to this, that I might preach every day for the ten years, but might not personally appeal to the unconverted outside the pulpit; or that I might not enter the pulpit during these ten years, but might exclusively appeal to individuals, I would not hesitate one moment to make the choice of personal effort as the sole means to be used in securing the conversion of one thousand souls necessary to my own salvation.”

Dr. Theodore Cuyler once said concerning the three thousand souls he had received into Church fellowship during his ministry, “I have handled every stone.”

STUDY IV.

Trophies of personal effort.

Memory Verse:  “And he that is wise winneth souls.”—­(Prov. xi, 30, R.V.)

Scripture for Meditation:  2 Cor. v, 14-21.

Is it not a suggestive fact that nearly all those men who have shone brightly in the galaxy of martyrs, preachers, and reformers in the Christian Church through the centuries have been won to Christ by the personal effort of some consecrated life?  Think of some in our own age.

Dwight L. Moody, when a clerk in a store, was visited by his Sunday-school teacher, who put his hand upon the young man’s shoulder and talked to him about Christ; and Mr. Moody says, “I had not felt I had a soul till then.”

Colonel H.H.  Hadley, who has kneeled and prayed with over thirty-five thousand drunkards, declares that one of the agencies which led him to Christ was a brief interview with Chaplain (now Bishop) McCabe on a railway-train in Ohio just after the Civil War.

Lord Shaftesbury, one of the greatest Christian philanthropists of the nineteenth century, was won for Christ in early boyhood by the effort of Maria Willis, a servant-girl in his father’s home.

The conversion of Diaz, the great Cuban evangelist, was due to the faithfulness of a consecrated young lady of Brooklyn.  She found him in a hospital at the point of death, procured a Spanish New Testament, read to him the words of mercy and invitation, pointed him to Christ; and he went back to his own country, a flaming herald of the gospel.