Not There by William Ambrose Spicer

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jan 28, 1909

Not There

By William Ambrose Spicer

WHILE our sympathies were being deeply moved for the sufferers by the most disastrous earthquake of history, there was no anxiety lest any of our own people or workers were involved in it. So far as our records go, no representative of this message has ever entered Sicily or those regions of Southern Italy where thousands were suddenly plunged into death.

The papers say that multitudes of people in Italy, their hearts failing for fear, are persuaded that the end of the world is at hand. But we have never planted a standard in southernmost Italy.

When, a few years ago, the volcano of Mont Pelée, in the West Indies, overwhelmed thirty thousand people in a moment, we were conscious of the fact that no messenger of this truth had ever touched the French Catholic island of Martinique. It lay not far from our own shores, but we never reached it.

Is it not time resolutely to plan to place just the first leaven of truth by the printed page, or at least one witness, in every great division of the many portions of earth as yet unentered? We are strong enough now, surely, at least to blaze a trail of the message through these unentered regions, so that seekers after the truth may find their way to it.

There is much more to be done, it is true, in all the older fields. But as these judgments are breaking over the earth, sweeping away multitudes for whom we have never lifted a hand, the absolutely neglected fields spread their dark dimensions before us in solemn rebuke. W. A. S.