THE VOICE OF GOD IN PRINT.
By Delavan L. Pierson
PROBABLY no means has been so widely used to voice the call of God as has the PRINTED PAGE. The "Life of Brainerd" sent Henry Martyn and Samuel Marsden to the field. William Carey was aroused to see the condition of the heathen world by the reading of Cook's "Voyages," and Fuller's Tract convinced him of the duty of Christians to give them the Gospel. Hans Egede, the Moravian, was led to Greenland by reading chronicles of the lost colony of Eric the Red, and the "Memoirs of William Burns" turned John Kenneth McKenzie toward China. The call to Dr. John Scudder, of India, came in the form of a little tract on "The Claims of Six Hundred Millions." The facts and arguments of this tract, which he picked up casually in visiting a patient, so burned into his soul that he gave up his growing medical practise in New York, and offered himself for Ceylon. The arguments of his friends failed to move him, tho he recognized the great opportunities of a Christian physician in a large city. He was keenly conscious of the duty which he owed to his wife, whom he had married, expecting to remain at home, and to the child that had been given them, but, in contrast to other claims, he saw the cross and the dying Saviour, who seemed to say: "If I, your Lord and Master, have suffered all this to save these poor benighted ones, will you hesitate to carry to them the glad tidings by which alone they can be saved?" To him there was no escape from such Divine logic, and on his knees he responded, "Lord, I go, since Thou hast commanded to preach the Gospel to every creature." A somewhat unusual story, but one which contains no new principles of action, is that chain of circumstances and convictions which led Bishop Tucker to leave his artist's studio for the jungles of Africa. One day he was painting a picture of a poor woman thinly clad, and pressing a babe to her bosom, wandering homeless on a stormy winter night in the dark, deserted streets. The closed and bolted doors offer no haven of rest, and the faint flickers of light only serve to reveal her misery. As the picture grew, the artist suddenly threw down his brush, exclaiming, "Instead of merely painting the lost, I will go out and save them." He entered the ministry, worked in the London slums, and finally decided to go where the darkness was thickest and the condition of the lost most hopeless. Thus he became in time the successor of Hannington, the martyred Bishop of Uganda, and the leader in one of the most remarkable transformations the world has ever known. The peculiar circumstance which turned Robert Moffat's heart toward Africa was the sight of a placard announcing a missionary meeting. The date had already passed, but he was in a thoughtful frame of mind, and the placard recalled stories which he had heard his mother tell. He determined to devote his life to the heathen, even tho he had to go to sea and be cast away on an island in order to do it.—Delavan L. Pierson.