LET THE DEAD BURY THEIR DEAD

Winifred and Hubert walked a part of the way home in silence.  At length the former spoke.

“It seems to me we have been rather blind concerning the object of missions,” she said.  “What do you think of it now, Hubert?”

“I am convinced that I have taken a very shallow view of it,” Hubert replied.  “It is a marvel to me now that I could have missed so completely the true motive of missions.  It is as clear as daylight in the Bible.  It is humiliating to think one has been so contentedly provincial in thoughts of God’s salvation.  I am ashamed of it.”

“So am I,” agreed Winifred, and then they walked on in silence.  An uneasy thought was gnawing at her heart that hardly found expression.  Had it been put in words it would have been something like this: 

“How are we to act with reference to new light on the will of God?  If Hubert and I are really His children, called into His fellowship, then we must be sympathetic with His wish and do what we can to forward it.  What would that be?”

Soon they reached the door of their home.  Home!  What a pleasant word it is.  How easily the accustomed key turned in the latch, and how familiarly the house belongings greeted them as they entered.  Ay, “there’s no place like home,” and its cords wind themselves about us silently, certainly, until it seems almost a sacrilege to think of leaving it.

Hubert went at once to his room, to the spot where questions were wont to be settled, and when dinner was announced he begged to be excused.

Winifred and her father sat alone at the table.  He inquired concerning the missionary meeting, and she rehearsed to him much of what Mr. Carew had said.

“Ah, very good—­very good,” Mr. Gray said.  “Very conclusive, I should think.”

But it did not occur to him how a conclusive argument and a life action might stand related.  Theories cost nothing when only the mind assents to them.  But wrought in the heart, they mold lives after them.

In Hubert’s room a painful heart process was going on.  Sunk in a deep, capacious chair, with head resting upon his hand, he set in order before himself the axiomatic truths he had heard.

“God’s supreme work is salvation,” he meditated.  “The field for this work is the world—­the whole world.  Salvation is wrought—­as to man’s part—­through faith in a message preached.  The message requires a messenger.  In vast proportions of the field the messengers are wanting.  What should be done about it?  Clearly, the messengers should rally at the command of God.  But it must be at His command.  Men cannot go self-sent.”

This thought gave a brief respite to the haunting sense of a responsibility.

“Whom shall I send and who will go for us?” The double questions heard by Isaiah in the temple repeated itself now in Hubert’s mind.