A like difference is showing itself between the results there and here.  Here they are scantier, and gotten with great difficulty; there much larger, and with greater ease.  There the door is wide-open, and people crowding in; here there is a feeling that the door is closing, surely and not slowly people turn away elsewhere.  There has come to be an unusual proportion of pickles and salads and other relishes served with every spreading of the Gospel meal here.  There, just plain unbuttered bread is eagerly and thankfully sought for.  They are hungry.  And their hunger is a wide-open door to us.  We need the exercise of foreign travel, and a great deal of it, to bring back our zest.

"Inasmuch."

May I speak very softly of another side of this knocking at our door? Who is it that is knocking?  Aye, Who?

Do you remember Jesus’ words in Matthew, chapter twenty-five?  He is speaking of the settling-up time that is to come at the close of things.  And He does something there that is startling.  He identifies Himself with the hungry and cold and poor.  That is, He puts Himself in their place.  They are reckoned as though they were He.  He says that when they asked for some food and warm clothes it was really Himself asking for food and warmth! We have been really dealing with Him when we have met these needy ones.  The one test question He makes for all is this—­What did you do for these hungry people?  Because what you did, or didn’t do for them, was done or refused to Me.  Jesus comes in the guise of the needy.  Who is it knocking at our door so loudly to-day?

I suppose if you could think of Jesus actually coming to-day to New York, the human Jesus I mean, coming as a man just as He came to Jerusalem, but known to us as He is now—­I suppose there is hardly a door that would not open to Him.  He might not be any better understood in New York than He was in Jerusalem, but the doors of the wealthy would quickly open to Him.  I mean the Christian wealthy, the Church wealthy; other doors, too, no doubt, but these surely.  He would have a great welcome.

And I suppose, too, that if in some wealthy home on Fifth Avenue or Madison Avenue He were to ask His host to give some large sum, a million dollars or ten millions, for sending the Gospel to China or Japan His request would likely be granted.  It seems to me rather probable that it would.  Well, how can it be put plainly enough that He does come to our doors, rich, and less rich, and poor.  He’s at the front door now, knocking and asking our help.

In these heathen peoples of His, Jesus comes to us.  And we have been giving Him—­shall I say it very softly for sheer shame?—­we have given, not all, but most of us, what is practically the loose change in our trousers’ pocket; not actually, of course; sometimes even that.  We have spent more on everything else.  We have made up boxes of cast-off clothes and old shoes for—­Jesus! This has been a large part of our answer.  Is it any wonder the hot blood sends the color climbing into our cheeks at the thought, and that we instinctively seek for some explanation that will soften the hard rub of the truth!