n we ever excuse ourselves that it has been a matter of such
indifference to us? He has limited Himself to human instruments for the
carrying to the lips of dying ones whom He loves the water from the
smitten Rock, and how have we responded? Are we indeed His sons and
daughters, that His supreme wish should be our last concern?"

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