Following the Flight of the Message by W. A. S.

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Feb 8, 1912

Following the Flight of the Message

By W. A. S.

(Concluded)

It was in 1848, just as our pioneer brethren were preparing to publish the first paper to herald the message of the judgment-hour, that three New York men petitioned the Colombian government for a concession to construct a railway across the isthmus. Wherever we turn our eyes, we see a divine providence has been making ways for the message as the hour of God's judgment came.

And we can learn a lesson in system and hygiene and careful organization from the modern engineer. The French engineers began with little thought of sanitation, and in the days when no one knew about the mosquito as a disease-bearer. The first work-camps were death-traps. The laborers were called in and settled in the mud and marsh and went to work. The result was disease and death and failure.

When the American government began the work, a new age of systematic sanitation had dawned. The first thing the authorities did was to spend a year or two in cleaning up towns, paving streets, establishing sewer systems, and building sanitary homes. The wide verandas were screened completely by wire mosquito-netting. Everywhere ponds and lakes were covered with oil to prevent

the breeding of the mosquito. Care of health is compulsory. The result is plainly to be seen. I have been told by canal workers again and again that they have never had better health in their lives. It has completely transformed the region that only twenty years ago stood for every disease and fever pest known.

We are surely on right lines in our missionary operations, in planning for sanitary and habitable quarters for the missionary as the first essential. Health for the service is the first thing after the spiritual equipment for ministering to souls. The new light that has come in recent years, as to the care of the health and the avoidance of disease, has come in the providence of God just as we are ready to respond to the commission to go through every unhealthful clime with the message of salvation.

But we must resolutely work to the plan. Sanitation is enforced by military discipline in the Canal Zone. We shall have to let the yet higher law of the divine commission put us under discipline. Our workers in unhealthful fever climes must watch insanitary conditions and the mosquito, as soldiers watch the enemy at the gate. The work that has been done in sanitation and the sharp results secured in the Canal Zone are one of the greatest lessons of history. It is taught us just at the time when our picket-line is pushing into the heart of the tropics in every continent. Thank God for his wonderful preparation of the way for the message, and for the divine power that is causing it to raise up the fruitage of commandment-keepers everywhere.

I find our workers of good courage. They say that the rare visits from brethren of the general work passing through, with the opportunities to talk of the experiences and progress of the message as looked at from the home point of view, greatly cheer and encourage them.

On the other hand, it is cheering to us who come out from the home lands to feel the warm, glowing love for the message that abounds in the homes of these missionaries of ours. They live under unnatural conditions; they often see their children growing up amid disadvantageous circumstances.

But these workers have come out in the name of the Lord to seek for the lost sheep over every plain and mountain trail. They are here for the love of souls; and wherever I find these missionary homes I thank God for the inspiration of them. We do not always hear the reports of the work the missionary wives are doing. But there they are, in our missionary homes all round the earth, keeping the home spirit and making the home one of the most blessed things on earth, and a type of the eternal home in heaven. Thank God again for the missionary homes, and remember them in prayer at the daily worship-hour.

Our lines are so long drawn out, and so thin at every point; and sin and evil seek so determinedly to check the advance that our only hope is in the living God whose arm is moved by prayer. The bigness of our work is terrible as we think of the smallness of our ranks and resources. But with us are the living God and all the holy angels. So the work will hasten on to completion.

W. A. S.

Panama City.