The Outlook in the Fields Abroad
By W. A. SPICER
WHAT the prophet saw in vision on the isle of Patmos, we see with our eyes to-day,—the last message of the “everlasting gospel” flying to every land and nation, bringing forth the predicted fruitage in a people keeping “the commandments of God, and the faith of Jesus.” This report aims but to point toward the wondrous panorama of the closing work that is passing before our sight from year to year. There is less call at this Conference than ever before for any detailed survey of the mission fields in the secretary’s report. Four years ago thirty-nine delegates gathered here from lands outside of North America. In this session we have welcomed over eighty, with many other visiting representatives from over all the seven seas. The “sure word of prophecy” demands a truly world-wide work under the advent movement. This gathering of the fields bears witness that these scriptures are fulfilling before our eyes. Here are men whose field of labor calls them to preach the message within the arctic circle. Others come from shores washed by antarctic currents. Here are brethren from Africa to tell of advancing missionary frontiers, and of regions yet beyond where many tribes and tongues are still “waiting in the wild.” Asia’s millions—half the world—are represented by the largest delegation we have ever seen from the Orient; and fitly so, for the last four years have been the years of organization and growth in the Far East. And Europe—vigorously expanding Europe—has the most cheering reports of its history to present. Up from South and Central America, from Australasia, and from the islands of the seas, the representatives of the great advent movement of the prophecy have come to tell what their eyes have seen and their ears have heard of the progress of the message in the uttermost places of the earth. These delegates from abroad represent 48,054 Sabbath-keepers of many tongues and peoples. Those figures are more than the total membership of the denomination eighteen years ago, in 1895, and are an increase during the four years of 15,549, growth of nearly 4,000 a year. This is a fruitage over which all who have made the gifts of sacrifice for missions—conferences and people—rejoice together with a foretaste of that joy that is coming by and by when all the sheaves are gathered home. During the last year—to borrow one item of the European report—the European Division took into the church 5,484 new members. This is more than the membership of the entire denomination in 1869 and 1870, when a little company of Sabbath-keeping Adventists in Europe sent Elder J. Erzberger to America to find our people and to invite us to send workers across the Atlantic. Truly the message is speeding on. During these last four years 372 new missionaries have been sent out from America, Europe, and the colonial unions into the mission fields. This is adding to the force at the rate of nearly one hundred missionaries a year. It is a wonderful record, measured by the average of other missionary societies with much greater income. It is almost incomprehensible how these numbers can be kept going forth year after year. The figures of the treasurer’s report show how the growing faith and liberality of the believers have followed fast after the advancing work. The Lord is surely making his people willing in this day of his power. The reports from the fields will tell of new missions established and new tongues praising God for the light of the threefold message. In states and provinces and islands never touched by the feet of any messenger of this movement four years ago, we now hear of companies of believers. The statistical report shows 2,777 evangelistic laborers in the fields outside of the United States in 1912. This is more than we had in all the world ten years ago, the total for 1903 being 2,708. Now the total is 5,101. For the first time in our history the fields outside of the United States have a slight majority of the evangelistic force. This growth of the laboring staff is in the right direction, and the American conferences rejoice to see it, and have labored for it. To these fellow workers not with us here, who are battling away on the firing line in this and other lands as we meet together in General Conference, we send the word of greeting to-day. Our hearts are with them, and we crave no blessing here that we do not ask the Lord to pour also richly upon their souls. And for those in the lonely places of earth, amid darkness that can well-nigh be felt, we ask a special grace as they preach the message of the blood that cleanses from all sin. “O missionaries of the blood! Ambassadors of God!
Our souls flame in us when we see where ye have fearless trod.
At break of day your dauntless faith our slackened valor shames,
And every eve our joyful prayers are jeweled with your names.” Enough of figures. But these figures demonstrate that the power of God is in the preaching of the third angel’s message. Nothing else can account for such growth of the work in all lands, in the face of every earthly influence. It is the blessed power from on high that brings these thousands of new voices every year to join in lifting yet higher the glad cry of the coming of the Lord. Our trust is not in the numbers, nor in the rising column of gifts for missions, but in the living God, who can save with many or with few. Yet as the New Testament church rejoiced to see the thousands added to the church, and the resources of the believers laid upon the altar, so we thank God and rejoice at the evident tokens that he is finishing the work in our day, and cutting it short in righteousness. Many have no doubt visited the Sabbath School Department exhibit, and looked at the maps of the world there displayed, with the blue stars marking the places where the Sabbath-schools gather from Sabbath to Sabbath round the circle of the earth. Those star points have been multiplying before our eyes in a wonderful way. These maps remind one of that picture given us in the book “Gospel Workers” many years ago:— “Would that every one of you could have a view that was presented to me years ago. In my very girlhood the Lord saw fit to open before me the glories of heaven. I was in vision taken to heaven, and the angel said to me, ‘Look!’ I looked to the world as it was in dense darkness. Again the word came, ‘Look ye!’ And again I looked intently over the world, and I began to see jets of light like stars dotted all through this darkness; and then I saw another and another added light, and so all through this moral darkness the star-like lights were increasing. And the angel said, ‘These are they that believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and are obeying the words of Christ. These are the lights of the world; and if it were not for these lights, the judgments of God would immediately fall upon the transgressors of God’s law.’ I saw then these little jets of light growing brighter, shining forth from the east and the west, from the north and the south, and lighting the whole world.” Thank God for every jet of light. Few as these even yet are, they now belt this dark earth with a line of sparkling light. From the time that the rising sun of a new Sabbath wakes our brethren in the islands of the mid-Pacific—where the day has its spring—there is not an hour of the twenty-four that the Sabbath sunrise, passing westward round the earth, is not calling Seventh-day Adventist believers forth to the blessed duties of God’s holy day of rest. “From the rising of the sun even unto the going down of the same,” says the Lord, “my name shall be great among the Gentiles.” “We thank thee that thy church unsleeping,
While earth rolls onward into light,
Through all the world her watch is keeping,
And rests not now by day or night.
“As o’er each continent and island
The dawn leads on another day,
The voice of prayer is never silent,
Nor dies the strain of praise away.
“The sun that bids us rest is waking
Our brethren ’neath the western sky,
And hour by hour fresh lips are making
Thy wondrous doings heard on high.” And it is one people, one fellowship, in all the earth, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one “blessed hope,” one keynote in the sounding of the message. Others may have a church South and a church North, a work in one continent independent of all others; but with us it is one field, the world that God so loved, and one work, the message of the prophecy to every nation and tongue. And it is one people, the people of the prophecy, keeping “the commandments of God, and the faith of Jesus.” We are one in faith and hope and organic relationship, however many army divisions or regimental brigades the nature of the work may make expedient for quickly getting over the field. This earth may be rent with war and strife, and political and racial rivalries may put up many a13troublesome barrier; but till the work is done and the blood-washed throng marches in through the gates into the city, the advent people of the prophecy shall be one. “For our citizenship is in heaven; from whence also we wait for a Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ.” In the expanding work we have seen the mission growing into the conference, the conferences into the union conference, and here and there the unions into divisions. As in Ezekiel’s vision, it is “as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel;” but thanks be to God, the same life-giving Spirit of power is in the wheels, and the hand of Omnipotence is plainly seen guiding and controlling in every part. The progress of our work sends us continually to the atlas or the encyclopedia, to learn where this new station is, or what that new language may be in which the truth is sounding. We are learning a new geography these days in keeping pace with the onward sweep of the message. Tribes whose names we had never heard a few years ago are to-day yielding fruitage in precious souls redeemed. It is coming to pass as promised long ago,— “I will bring thy seed from the east, and gather thee from the west; I will say to the north, Give up; and to the south, Keep not back: bring my sons from far, and my daughters from the ends of the earth.” Isa. 43: 5, 6. We are seeing it done. In places far beyond our reach hearts are being stirred up to search for the truth for this time. Again and again we have had evidence of this. Only a few days ago Elder A. N. Allen reported that on a recent trip among the Andean foot-hills, in northern Peru, he had learned of a group of Sabbath-keepers who had for years kept the light of the Sabbath truth shining amid Catholic darkness, knowing nothing of any Sabbath reform movement in the world. The little group had died off, but their testimony may yet yield fruitage to the message. It reminds us of the aged father in Spain, who told his daughter that some day the true gospel and the true Sabbath would come to Spain, that word long after his death leading the daughter to recognize this message when our workers came with it to her door. In every land the Holy Spirit is turning true hearts toward the light for these last days. The Lord is surely searching out his scattered sheep, and the gathering call is sounding away beyond any knowledge of ours. Representatives of this cause are now to be found all up and down the world’s highways. Men can not easily run away from the sound of the message. They may go to the uttermost part of the earth, but it is there. An incident illustrating this came to Sister F. W. Spies, of Brazil, some time ago. Last summer she told me that she was traveling up the Brazilian coast by steamer, and found herself sitting on deck alongside an aged Norwegian sea-captain. He had left his ship at Buenos Aires to go into a hospital, and now as a passenger on a liner he was making his last voyage home to die among his people. As they talked, he said to Sister Spies:— “Many years ago a man sold me some religious books in Liverpool, as I was sailing from that port. They were strange books, teaching doctrines different from the general teaching of the churches. They disturbed me, and I put them away. Later I read them again. They upset me. The end of it was that I finally threw them overboard. Years after that my ship was off Pitcairn Island, and I stopped to get water and fresh fruits. And, will you believe it? I found that the people of that island believed the same doctrines taught in those books. They all set in to try to convert me to these teachings. That was years ago. But since I have been sick and must soon die, do you know I have kept thinking more and more of the things taught in those books?” “And now,” Mrs. Spies said to him, “I must tell you something more of those books. I belong to the people who printed them, and who are preaching these doctrines in all parts of the world.” Thus once again, on the Brazilian coast, the old sea-captain heard the truths of the “blessed hope.” So up and down the earth the words of truth are running to and fro, their sound following men over land and sea with the call to prepare to meet the Lord. There remains still much land to be possessed. This must spur us on. In all the entered fields are vast regions unworked. And the A B C of our unentered fields is still suggestive enough. In the list of fields untouched, A may stand for Arabia, Afghanistan, Abyssinia, the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, and Annam, with many millions. B stands for Baluchistan, Bechuanaland, Bhutan, the Bismarck Archipelago, and it would have stood also for populous Borneo a few months ago; but our Malaysia Mission has just sent a worker there. C stands for Colombia,—the only unentered South American state,—for Ceylon, Cyprus, Crete, and the great Congo State of Africa. Yes, there is a vast field beyond us yet. This is no place to rest. But it is a source of refreshment and courage to see how remarkably the Lord has blessed in planting the standard in nearly all the great countries of the world. And he is sending his Word by the Bible societies along the remotest byways. Last year, for instance, the British society published the Gospels in whole or in part in eight new languages. Such language-names as Dabida, Beta, Kiwai—wholly unknown to most of us at least—show how the smallest tribes are now being reached. Dabida on this list means that a dialect of British East Africa speaks the inspired words of God for the first time. Beta is one of the tongues of Borneo; and Kiwai, a dialect of the Fly River region of New Guinea. Thus the least of dialects and the uttermost tribes are being reached by the living words; and wherever the inspired Word goes, the way of the Lord is being prepared. A few months ago an Englishman, Robert Arthington, left by will $4,500,000 to be used in giving to “every tribe of mankind that has them not, accurate and faithful copies of at least the Gospels of St. John and St. Luke, together with the book of the Acts,” with provision that a few in every tribe be taught to read these sacred pages. “He was one of those,” says a newspaper, “who believed that Christ would return to reign on earth when the gospel had been preached to every nation or tribe.” God, the living God, has many agencies for the accomplishment of his work. The promise is sure: “This gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come.” There is to be no failure. We know the divine certainty of the things wherein we have been instructed. Beyond our comprehension as it is, the stupendous and overwhelming fact is that God is finishing the work of all the ages before our eyes to-day. Great and important events are following one another swiftly. In the populous Orient changes that ordinarily would have required the workings of half a century we have seen wrought in the last year or two, opening more widely than ever the doors of access. The two thousand missionaries gathered in the great World’s Missionary Congress in Edinburgh, in 1910, gave voice to their deepest conviction as to the times in which we live in the message addressed to all Christendom:— “The next ten years will in all probability constitute the turning-point in human history, and may be of more critical importance in determining the spiritual evolution of mankind than many centuries of ordinary experience.” The world’s crisis is upon us. The fathers in the faith of this advent message expected that the end would have come ere this. Our slowness of faith has delayed the progress. And, too, the field of the work was larger than at first apprehended. The horizon has lifted and lifted as the cause moved forward. But now all lands are compassed. It remains only to fill in the gaps and enter the vacant spaces within the outer lines. Our horizon now is the circumference of the earth itself. The uttermost parts have been reached, and we wait on the power of the living God, who has made bare his holy arm in the sight of all the nations; and whenever he wills it, all the ends of the earth shall see the salvation of our God. Thank God, we do not have to figure out by statistical records how long it will take us to finish the work. He is the one to finish the work and cut it short in righteousness. He has the almighty power, and all the nations to him are but as the little dust in the balance; and every soul is within hearing of the voice of his Spirit. Now it is only to give to him our all in service and in resources, and he who fed the multitude with the few loaves and fishes will miraculously multiply our store for the supplying of the world’s great need. The journey is almost over, and just before lies the shining city at the end of the pathway of the advent people. It is the same city for which Abraham looked. The faithful of all the ages have looked for it. The pioneers in the advent movement who have fallen in death saw by faith this celestial city just before. There is no consciousness to those who sleep in death, no passing of time. It will be to every generation of the faithful as if the believer had but closed the eyes in the last sleep, and the next instant, to the consciousness, come the resurrection and the Saviour with the innumerable company of angels escorting all the ransomed to the city of God. But we shall not all sleep. At last the470time has come when but a few more years shall roll, a few more seasons come, and every eye shall see the glory of the coming of the Lord. “You have preached the soon coming of the Lord these many years,” says the doubter, “why do you keep on preaching it?” Because he is quickly coming, we reply. What are a few years more or less in the perspective of eternity? It is said that Whitefield preached over three hundred sermons on the text, “Ye must be born again.” When asked why he preached so often from the same text, he replied, “Because ye must be born again.” So the swift approach of the second coming of Christ in power and glory is to be the key-note of every message, because “he is near, even at the door.” The heavenly city with the mansions prepared is no mere dream of enthusiastic hearts. “I John saw the holy city,” cries the prophet. The Lord showed it to John that he might tell us that he saw it there. It is there, with the pure river of water of life clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb. A few more journeyings to and fro in the service of the King of that fair country, and we shall drink at the fountainhead with all the faithful. That is the hope that will lighten the load and make jubilant our feet till every land has been reached and every nation and tongue has heard the message. “It is but a fancy of longing hearts,” says the doubter; “only as the beautiful mirage of pools and waving palms that floats before the eyes of the traveler in the desert lands.” So the Christian’s hope has ever seemed to unbelief. But well we know by the sure word fulfilling before our eyes that now the consummation of the Christian’s hope is at last to be realized. It is no vanishing mirage that floats before faith’s vision. As Isaiah’s prophecy of the closing work puts it (according to the margin of the Revised Version), “The mirage shall become a pool, and the thirsty ground springs of water. . . . And a highway shall be there, and a way, and it shall be called The way of holiness; the unclean shall not pass over it; but it shall be for . . . the redeemed. . . . And the ransomed of the Lord shall return, and come with singing unto Zion; and everlasting joy shall be upon their heads: they shall obtain gladness and joy, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.” Isa. 35: 7-10. At last the time to favor Zion, “yea, the set time, is come.” Praise the Lord, it is true; it is true. It is not a dream. That highway is cast up. The ransomed of Jehovah are coming with singing from all the ends of the earth. May God clothe his people with power for the last work of witnessing that is to usher in the long-expected day.