The speaker’s eyes had deepened in color as he spoke.  Now they burned with intense feeling.  His long, tenacious hands were clenched repressively.  He went on: 

“I imagine I hear an objection that the same work is being done at home, and that there is ample field here still.  We may not trust our own understanding to argue the case as to the value of confining our efforts to the home field, but let the Scriptures, always ready to instruct us, give us light.  Probably we will agree that Paul, the apostle-missionary, is in his life an exponent of the theory of Gospel preaching.  He had an ambition.  Hear how he expresses it:  ’Yea, being ambitious so to preach the Gospel, not where Christ was already named, that I might not build upon another man’s foundation; but, as it is written

  “’They shall see, to whom no tidings of him came,
  And they who have not heard shall understand.’

“He shows his Roman readers his method; telling them that from Jerusalem unto Illyricum (just across the Adriatic Sea from Italy) he had ’fully preached the Gospel of Christ.’  Now he was ready to look farther, his task to those regions being accomplished.  What did he mean?  Was he leaving behind him converted areas, whose every inhabitant magnified God in Christ Jesus?  Far from it.  ‘Fully preached’ though he had, communities were still heathen, but for the lights that he had kindled from place to place in his persecuted journeyings.  Remembering that he is in his life the model for Gospel preaching, as he is in his writings the messenger of Christian doctrine, must we not see that the Gospel is for broadcast sowing, not for close gardening, save by the careful hands that God will raise up in the wake of the evangelist.  Or, to use another figure, it is the notification, to lost heirs, of a fortune bequeathed them; and the responsibility of the ones entrusted with the carrying out of the will is not so much to persuade heirs to receive their inheritance as to notify them of it.  So the Apostle preached ’not where Christ was named,’ having a zeal to discharge his debtorship of making known to all nations God’s gift of grace.  Now over into Spain—­far, far afield, as distances then were gauged—­the eager eyes of the Apostle looked and longed for a crown of rejoicing from that land also in the day of Christ.  In him we see the faithful exposition of the missionary idea.”

By this time Hubert was looking at the speaker very intently, with widened, almost startled, eyes that were opening to a new idea.  Winifred also sat with riveted gaze, her cheeks slightly paling beneath the deepening conviction of a tremendous truth.  True worshiper that she was, to know the truth must be to shape her life in consonance with it, and a voice at her heart gave warning that to be conformed to this newly revealed will of God would be pain.  But where was the theory that had seemed so clear and sensible to both Hubert and herself when they came to the meeting?  Hubert always had clear ideas.  What would he say to this?  Now Mr. Carew was saying: