Following the Flight of the Message by William Ambrose Spicer

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Feb 1, 1912

Following the Flight of the Message

By William Ambrose Spicer

HARDLY a mail-steamer leaves port in Europe or America that is not bearing some printed page proclaiming the coming of the Lord. Along most of the highways, and in many a byway, all over the earth, the living witnesses to the third angel's message are found. With all the land yet unpossessed, the distribution over the earth of the literature of the message and of those who bear it, is nevertheless something remarkable.

A few years ago one might rarely meet a Seventh-day Adventist in foreign travel. It is not so now.

Last summer, for instance, on the way to the Friedensau council, I had but a day in London. Going across Trafalgar Square, in the heart of that great city of seven millions, I met face to face one of the English believers. Going on a day's journey to Magdeburg, Germany (where I did not know we had believers), I was accosted on the street by two sisters whom I had met a year or so before at camp-meeting. The two experiences, coming so closely together, seemed a suggestion of the way in which believers in the advent message are continually crossing one another's paths up and down the world.

To-day I am writing from the Canal Zone, away to the southward, and all along this great highway of commerce I have been daily meeting believers rejoicing in the “blessed hope.”

The Lord has set his hand to plant the witnesses all through this dark world; and thank God their numbers are increasing in every zone, with every passing year.

In this half-week of waiting for ship connections southward to Ecuador, I have had the privilege of meeting with our people at various points along the Panama Railway. At Colon, which is the headquarters of our West Caribbean Conference, the brethren are just completing their conference office building, with book depository and meeting-hall below, and rooms for two or three families above. These facilities are needed, as since the fire a year ago, that destroyed

the union conference printing-plant and led to its removal to Jamaica, the church in Colon and Cristobal has had no proper meeting-place. Elder H. C. Goodrich, president of the conference, lives here, also Brother G. C. Jenks, the field canvassing agent. The book work has developed strongly the last year, and we shall see yet greater work done with the publications in this polyglot region. The systematic training of the canvasser has borne the usual fruit in South Central America. It is cheering to see it.

Out at Mount Hope, two miles up the canal, we had a splendid Sabbath congregation. The believers are mostly West Indian brethren, some of whom learned the truth in the islands. Last evening here in Panama City, at the Pacific entrance to the canal, we had a good congregation filling their small meeting-hall to overflowing. There is the nucleus of a good company already gathering in the old city of Panama, where Elder B. E. Connerly and his wife are working. This is a typical Spanish American city; and no small one either. The population is about thirty-five thousand.

It is good to see the work of God moving on alongside this mighty engineering undertaking. The canal is the greatest piece of excavating ever undertaken by human hands. What a task it is to pierce the isthmus that has divided the great seas since the flood. But modern engineering is pushing the work swiftly to completion. How quickly and easily the power of God threw up that great chain of mountains and hills that binds the two continents together, from Alaska to the Strait of Magellan; and this same power in hearts to-day along this highway is doing the mightiest works of all, in the transformations of character. All the combined engineering skill of earth could no more convert a heart than create a star. It is instructive to see the most powerful work of man and the mighty work of God contrasted as it is here. And to visit our brethren and sisters in their homes and to join with them in meetings has been the most interesting of all the experiences in these few days along the Canal Zone.

But the work of the canal construction has its missionary side, more interesting to us than its merely commercial or political significance. This is one of the providences of God in this generation, for the hastening on of the last message. The highways are being prepared, and seas and continents are being bridged or channeled for the swift work that is to be done in the closing days. What a blessing in our own work has been the Suez Canal, with its short road for our missionaries to southern Asia! Count de Lesseps, the French engineer, scored a great triumph there; and we thank God for it to-day. The great French engineer failed here in Panama. The time for so great a task had not quite come. Now the American government is completing the work begun by the French.

It was in 1879 that De Lesseps began the task. As one looks at the old machinery then in use, it is plainly apparent that the undertaking, with such tools, was a hopeless one. But with the new time have come new and marvelous engineering appliances. The great dredgers and shovels now at work seem like intelligent human giants, tearing at obstructions, and uprooting mountains. It is a wonderful display of natural forces harnessed and directed by the mind of man. This is the age of machinery and of quick motion.

To us who know why all these things have come in this generation, there is a wonderful lesson in the mighty undertaking going swiftly on here. And I believe that many men who are working at it feel somehow the pressure of Providence upon them to make haste. So it has been with many of the men who have opened new highways or pierced continents. And whether or not they themselves have recognized this impulse from without urging them on, we know that they have been agents of Providence preparing the way of the message in these last days. We may apply to them the words of the Lord to Cyrus: “I girded thee, though thou hast not known me.” W. A. S. (To be continued)