ever we can
hope helpfully to lift up Christ and goodness for his acceptance. The
secret thereof must come as came the message itself; as came our call
to declare it,--through another love warming our hearts into living
heat. The passion for humanity comes to the preacher as a result of
his passion for Christ. His love for Christ goes beyond its divine
object to all who are precious to his Lord. The worst of men is, by
right of redemption, Christ's man, dear to the preacher, because bought
by the blood which is more precious than silver and gold. The heathen
are His inheritance and the uttermost ends of the earth are His
possession. Urged, sustained and comforted by this reflection, the
missionary crosses stormy seas, ready to find, if need be, a grave in a
foreign land far from home and friends that, so going, he may speak to
His Lord's beloved concerning His wondrous grace. Here, and here only,
is the true missionary motive, the one missionary argument. We do
_not_ seek to save the heathen because of an eschatology which would
consign them to the outer darkness. We cannot receive as true any
conception of God which includes belief in a doctrine involving so
terrible an injustice as that men should be eternally punished for
refusing that which has never been offered for their acceptance. We
think, rather, of the Lord as robbed of the love of hearts He died to
win, hearts made precious by His death, and in the passion kindled by
our vision of the Master looking from His cross away over tossing seas
to those far-off lands and including every son of savagery to the last
moment of time in His dying petition, "Father, forgive them, they know
not what they do." We perceive upon every soul the sign of the cross;
and this sign makes every man a brother to the ends of the earth. So
the preacher is lifted by his love for his Master into a love for all
for whom He agonised and died.

And this, from the beginning of his preaching to its end, and in
relation to all the experiences into which his labours shall bring him,
must be the true preacher's way of looking at his fellow-men. The
social reformer has his way, too, the politician his, the scientist
his. This is the preacher's way. Each and every man is sanctified to
him by the sprinkling of blood. So he, also, will bear a cross for the
saving of men; so he, too, will carry the sorrows and sins of humanity.
He will have a Gethsemane of his own, be led to a Calvary