The speaker paused, and absently pushed back the hair from his flushed forehead.  An almost tragic yearning shone in his deepset eyes.  There was one in the congregation whose heart burned in a fellowship of grief over the Saviour’s unmet longing.  Mr. Carew continued more slowly, in a voice intensely sad and almost broken: 

“Do you sometimes quote softly for your comfort, ’I will guide thee with mine eye’?  You have thought of His eye upon you—­and that is right—­to care for, protect and lead.  But have you ever watched the glance of His eye with another thought, not for yourself, but for Him?  Not to see in it provision and help for you; but to see to what He is looking, for what He is longing—­what it is that will give joy to Him?  When I look in His eyes,” and the speaker was looking far away from his congregation and spoke as though half forgetting them, “I seem to hear Him saying, ‘I have other sheep—­I must bring them!’”

His voice sank to a whisper.  Hubert felt a little convulsive movement beside him and Winifred’s hand was shading her eyes.  Mr. Carew recovered from the emotion that nearly mastered him, and remembered his hearers and their probable wishes.  He began again: 

“But perhaps I am neglecting to tell you that which you came especially to hear—­some details concerning the actual work of God in China.  You will pardon me, but I cannot forbear speaking wherever I go concerning the principles underlying our work, as well as of the work itself.  One might describe the people and their ways—­and all that is valuable in making them more real to us—­and might present a score of curious things which would perhaps beguile an hour very pleasantly, but still leave an indifferent heart unchanged as to the real motive of missions.  However, all that I have said will gain and not lose by our turning attention for a time to the practical outworking of the theory.”

Then the speaker gave illustrations of the way lost souls are found in China.  Very pathetic were some of the incidents, and again and again Winifred’s eyes were dim, and an unspeakable pain gnawed at Hubert’s heart.  Fervently he thanked God for those whose darkness He had turned to light, but sad beyond expression seemed the repeated instances which had occurred in Mr. Carew’s experience of earnest pleadings for missionaries to be sent to various places and his absolute inability to answer the cry.  But broader than the fact of the wish of some stood the need of all!  Populous cities without one witness to the grace of God!  Wide regions untraversed by the feet of His messengers!  Hubert had thought New Laodicea a place of desperate need; and so it was in the matter of vital, fruit-bearing piety.  But as he thought of the inky darkness in which China’s millions dwelt this seemed a place of light.

The meeting came to an end.  But first the President expressed the thanks of those who had listened to the lecture, and hoped all had been stirred to greater zeal and effort for the future in helping so good a cause.  She suggested that the mite-boxes should be redistributed.