child's life, until young manhood and womanhood are reached. One of the
greatest tasks in child-training is to note the emergency, and meet it
successfully. And what keenness and patience and subtlety it does take
only he knows who has been through the experience.

<u>Spirit Contests.</u>

Emergencies come in spiritual matters, too. They are the hardest kind to
meet. It is hardest to make people see them and grip them. In the life of
many a church a spiritual emergency has come, but has not been met. The
church goes on holding services, raising money and paying it out, going
through all the proper forms, but with the life itself quite gone out of
it. The thing is being kept in motion by a humanly manipulated electric
current; there is no free life-movement.

Evangelistic leaders say that such emergencies come in their campaigning.
There has to be a struggle of spirit forces. And the victory that comes,
comes only as a result of close hand-to-hand conflict of soul by the
leaders.

We all know that such crises come in our personal experience. And those
who know about changing things by prayer do not need to be told of the
emergency that comes at times; nor of how it requires a tightening of all
the buckles, a new reviewing of the promises on which prayer rests, a new
steadying of one's faith, a quietly persistent hanging on, an intenser
insistence of spirit in prayer and more arrow-praying in the daily round
of work--sending out the softly breathed heart-pleadings while busy with
common duties, until the assurance comes that the danger is past and the
victory secure.

It is remarkable to what an extent the great events of history have been
emergency events. With the greatest reverence, it can be said that
history's central event, the dying of Jesus, was an emergency action. Even
though we understand clearly that it was known and counselled from before
the foundation of the world, that He was to shed His precious blood for
our salvation, His dying can never be fully understood save as a great
emergency measure, <i>the</i> great emergency measure, because of the crisis
made by sin.

Now that is the sort of thing--an emergency--that is now on in this great
task of world-wide evangelization which Jesus has committed to our hands.
Some of you may be strongly inclined to lift your eyebrows and ask--Is
there really any such emergency? I know that people don't like those words
"crisis" and "emergency." It is much mor