of Peter.  Is it not sufficient that the Commander has said, ‘Go ye’?  Had the task been set for angels, it would have been accomplished long since, for they do His pleasure.  But He trusted it to us, who might be expected to be so bound by ties of gratitude to His will that we would eagerly spring to do His bidding.  And we have miserably failed.  ‘Is there not another way?’ we languidly ask in the face of the command.  I do not see another way.  But the Lord has most clearly outlined this way:  That the Gospel should be preached in all the world to every creature, and that the one who believes and is baptized should be saved.  To sit and philosophically consider that an infinite God must surely find some other way if we fail in this, is not reverence for His wisdom.  It is mutiny.”

Some of the ladies looked startled at this bold setting forth of the case, and remembered how, privately, they had given voice to the sentiments under criticism before coming to the meeting.  The Secretary’s keen face betrayed thorough assent to what the speaker was saying, and the President was glad that she held such a relation as she did to a cause so evidently right, with a reverse side so evidently wrong.  The plain little body of the Church Social beamed thorough sympathy.

“Do you say,” continued Mr. Carew, “that God will be merciful to the heathen because of their ignorance?  I believe He will, and do not doubt that it will be ‘more tolerable’ for those who have never heard than for those in this country (heathen also, in the Scriptural sense) who, having often heard, are still rejectors of the Gospel.  But there is a greater question involved than that of lessened stripes or mitigated woe.  Do you say that men will be saved by lack of knowledge?  The prophet said his people perished for lack of it!  Ah, if God had ordained ignorance to be the way of salvation He might have spared Himself great cost!—­cost of the redemption sacrifice, and of its proclamation, often in martyr blood.  But He confers His boon to faith and ‘faith cometh by hearing.’

“You say it will increase the responsibility of the heathen if they hear, and put them in worse case if they reject the message?  Very true.  But had that been a sufficient reason it would have silenced our Lord’s ’Go ye’ at the outset of the age.  Never would the Gospel have traveled to our barbaric fathers, and we should be without hope to-day.  But the treasure was too great which the Saviour sought.  No thought of deeper shadows cast by the very brightness of the light could deter Him from holding it forth.  Beyond all cost of difficulty, danger, or the deepened condemnation of the lost, was the value of the Church He sought—­the pearl of great price for which all other possessions might be forfeited!  Ah, friends, since the object is so dear to Him, where are our hearts that we think of it so coldly!  The burden of my plea is for Him; not for the missionary, not for philanthropy, not even so much for the heathen themselves, as for Him, because He loves and longs to give but lacks the human vessels through which to give!”